Date: 4 March 2016, 4:30pm
Location: Hempfield High School, Room 213
 Speaker: Ralph Gomez, Swarthmore College     
   Title: Some Results in Generalized Contact Geometry
 

   Abstract. Nigel Hitchin developed the notion of generalized
complex geometry in 2002 and these ideas were further developed in the
thesis of Marco Gualtieri. The key idea is to define a bracket, the
so-called Courant bracket, on the direct sum of the tangent and
cotangent bundle. With this setup it becomes possible, for instance, to
view complex geometry and symplectic geometry as special cases of this
generalized complex geometric framework. However, generalized complex
geometry is necessarily an even dimensional framework. What about the
odd dimensional counterpart? In this talk, we review generalized complex
geometry and then discuss recent developments in this odd dimensional
counterpart called generalized contact geometry. We will report on
recent results obtained in this direction. This is joint work with Janet
Talvacchia.