Contact Geometry, General Relativity, and Thermodynamics: March 2-6, 2026

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Organized by:
Alberto Abbondandolo (Bochum)
Mohammed Abouzaid (Stanford)
Vladimir Chernov (Dartmouth)
Leonid Polterovich (Tel Aviv)
Stefan Suhr (Bochum)

The workshop will bring together experts in contact geometry, topology, and mathematical physics to focus on novel methods and phenomena in the geometry of the space of Legendrian submanifolds of contact manifolds, with an emphasis on causal and metric structures. One of the central themes is the interplay between these structures and Riemannian and Lorentzian geometries, as well as contact Hamiltonian dynamics. Additionally, the workshop will explore applications of contact geometry and dynamics to mathematical physics, including General Relativity and Thermodynamics.

There is also a Program: Contact geometry, general relativity and thermodynamics: February 9 – March 20, 2026, associated with this event.

Talk Schedule


Time Title Speaker Location
8:30am Breakfast N/A Simons Center Cafe
9:30am Virtual Legendrian linking and causality in generalized spacetimes Vladimir Chernov SCGP 102
10:30am Coffee Break N/A Simons Center Cafe
11:00am Cone structure and metrics that depend on time Miguel Angel Javaloyes SCGP 102
12:00pm Lunch N/A Simons Center Cafe
1:30pm Derivation of a contact Hamiltonian system from the Fokker-Planck equation Shin-itiro Goto SCGP 102
2:30pm Bi-invariant Lorentz-Finsler structures on the linear symplectic group and on contactomorphism groups Alberto Abbondandolo SCGP 102
3:30pm Tea N/A Simons Center Cafe
4:00pm Quantifying the flexibility of the Lorentz-Finsler geometry on contactomorphism groups Gabriele Benedetti SCGP 102

Time Title Speaker Location
8:30am Breakfast N/A Simons Center Cafe
9:30am Nonequilibrim thermodynamic, information entropy and contact geometry Yong-Geun Oh SCGP 102
10:30am Coffee Break N/A Simons Center Cafe
11:00am From contact structures to black hole entropy via volume extremization Dario Martelli SCGP 102
12:00pm Group Photo N/A SCGP Lobby
12:10pm Lunch N/A Simons Center Cafe
1:30pm Rigidities via contact Hamiltonian Floer homology Jun Zhang SCGP 102
2:30pm A potpourri of geometric structures for fluids and plasmas Philip Morrison SCGP 102
3:30pm Tea N/A Simons Center Cafe
4:00pm Topological consequences of null-geodesic refocusing and applications to $Z^x$ manifolds Friedrich Bauermeister SCGP 102

Time Title Speaker Location
8:30am Breakfast N/A Simons Center Cafe
9:30am TBA Mohammed Abouzaid SCGP 102
10:30am Coffee Break N/A Simons Center Cafe
11:00am On the non-orderability of contact manifolds with sub-critical Weinstein filling Jakob Hedicke SCGP 102
12:00pm Lunch N/A Simons Center Cafe
1:30pm Geometric ideal hydrodynamics Nikita Nekrasov SCGP 102
3:30pm Tea N/A Simons Center Cafe

Time Title Speaker Location
8:30am Breakfast N/A Simons Center Cafe
9:30am Arnold’s chord conjecture in cotangent bundles and the three-body problem Filip Brocic SCGP 102
10:30am Coffee Break N/A Simons Center Cafe
11:00am Contact non-squeezing in various closed prequantizations Pierre-Alexandre Arlove SCGP 102
12:00pm Lunch N/A Simons Center Cafe
1:30pm Contact big fibre theorem and non-squeezing Igor Uljarevic SCGP 102
2:30pm The size of an overtwisted disk Lukas Nakamura SCGP 102
3:30pm Tea N/A Simons Center Cafe
4:00pm Higher Legendrian Torsion Michael Sullivan SCGP 102
6:00pm Banquet N/A Simons Center Cafe

Time Title Speaker Location
8:30am Breakfast N/A Simons Center Cafe
9:30am Holography at Cauchy sets Olaf Muller SCGP 102
10:30am Coffee Break N/A Simons Center Cafe
11:00am Bi-Lipschitz contactomorphisms Ivan Dynnikov SCGP 102
12:00pm Lunch N/A Simons Center Cafe
1:30pm Invariants of open contact manifolds Yakov Eliashberg SCGP 102
3:30pm Tea N/A Simons Center Cafe