Category Archives: Symplectic geometry

Taut foliations and positive forms

This week I visited Washington University in St. Louis to give a colloquium, and caught up with a couple of my old foliations friends, namely Rachel Roberts and Larry Conlon. Actually, I had caught up with Rachel (to some extent) … Continue reading

Posted in 3-manifolds, Foliations, Symplectic geometry | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Causal geometry

On page 10 of Besse’s famous book on Einstein manifolds one finds the following quote: It would seem that Riemannian and Lorentzian geometry have much in common: canonical connections, geodesics, curvature tensor, etc. . . . But in fact this … Continue reading

Posted in Geometric structures, Lie groups, Symplectic geometry | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Cubic forms in differential geometry

Quadratic forms (i.e. homogeneous polynomials of degree two) are fundamental mathematical objects. For the ancient Greeks, quadratic forms manifested in the geometry of conic sections, and in Pythagoras’ theorem. Riemann recognized the importance of studying abstract smooth manifolds equipped with … Continue reading

Posted in Symplectic geometry | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments