Topology Seminar at the University of Miami

Organizers: Ken Baker, Nikolai Saveliev, Chris Scaduto
Time: Wednesdays at 11am
Location: Ungar 506

Spring 2026 Schedule

Date	Speaker
1/28/26	Shunyu Wan (Georgia Tech)
Title: Surgeries on knots and tight contact structures Abstract: The existence and nonexistence of tight contact structures on 3-manifolds are interesting and important topics studied over the past thirty years. Etnyre-Honda found the first example of a 3-manifold that does not admit tight contact structures, and later Lisca-Stipsicz extended their result and showed that a Seifert fiber space admits a tight contact structure if and only if it is not smooth (2n-1)-surgery along the T(2,2n+1) torus knot for any positive integer n. Surprisingly, since then no other example of a 3-manifold without tight contact structures has been found. Hence, it is interesting to study if all such manifolds, except those mentioned above, admit a tight contact structure. Towards this goal, I will discuss the joint work with Zhenkun Li and Hugo Zhou about showing any negative surgeries on any knot in S^3 admit a tight contact structure.
2/4/25	Advika Rajapakse (UCLA)
Title: Space-level properties of odd Khovanov homology Abstract: Odd Khovanov homology, developed by Ozsváth-Rasmussen-Szabó, is a categorification of the Jones polynomial with suspected connections to Heegaard Floer homology. We investigate the properties of the odd Khovanov spectrum, a space-level lift of odd Khovanov homology, using the second Steenrod square. Using this square operation, we uncover unexpected results regarding the behavior of this space, and classify it for prime knots up to 11 crossings.
2/11/26	Fraser Binns (Princeton)
TBD
2/18/25	Ali Naseri Sadr (Boston College)
TBD
2/25/26	Miriam Kuzbary (Amherst College)
TBD
3/4/25

3/11/26	Spring break

3/18/25	Juan Muñoz‑Echániz (Simons Center at Stony Brook)
TBD
3/25/26

4/1/25

4/8/26

4/15/25

4/22/26