Organized by:
Alberto Abbondandolo (Bochum)
Mohammed Abouzaid (Stanford)
Vladimir Chernov (Dartmouth)
Leonid Polterovich (Tel Aviv)
Stefan Suhr (Bochum)
The primary goal of this program is to investigate the causal structure on the space of Legendrian submanifolds—an emerging area of “hard” contact topology with deep connections to Riemannian and Lorentzian geometries, contact Hamiltonian dynamics, and Hofer-type geometry. This space is primarily studied through various flavors of Legendrian Contact Homology, a sophisticated algebraic invariant of Floer-theoretic nature, intricately linked to contact Hamiltonian dynamics and, in particular, to Reeb chords connecting Legendrian submanifolds.
Another central theme of the program is the interaction between contact topology and two areas of mathematical physics: General Relativity and Thermodynamics, with the causal structure providing a unifying framework.
There will also be a Workshop: Contact geometry, general relativity, and thermodynamics: March 2-6, 2026 associated with this event.