Organized by:
Alberto Abbondandolo (Bochum)
Mohammed Abouzaid (Stanford)
Vladimir Chernov (Dartmouth)
Leonid Polterovich (Tel Aviv)
Stefan Suhr (Bochum)
The goal of the program is two fold. First, we explore the causal structure on the space of Legendrian submanifolds, a profound and still largely unexplored geometric structure. The primary approach to studying this structure comes from various flavors of Legendrian Contact Homology, an efficient machinery of Floer-theoretic nature. We aim to investigate the interrelations between this causal structure and Riemannian and Lorentzian geometries, contact Hamiltonian dynamics, and Hofer-type geometry on the space of Legendrian submanifolds. Second, we will focus on the interactions between “hard” contact topology and two areas of mathematical physics: General Relativity and Thermodynamics, with the aforementioned causal structure serving as the unifying theme.
There will also be a workshop: Contact geometry, general relativity, and thermodynamics: March 2-6, 2026 associated with this event.