Claremont Topology Seminar: Hyunki Min (UCLA)

Title: Contact structures and the mapping class group of lens spaces

Abstract: One important problem in contact topology is to classify contact structures on a given manifold. Around 20 years ago, Giroux and Honda classified contact structures on lens spaces. A natural question to ask after that is how the transformations on lens spaces interact with the contact structures. In this talk, we study contactomorphisms on lens spaces, which are diffeomorphisms preserving the contact structure. We show that the contact mapping class group of a standard contact lens space is a subgroup of the mapping class group of the lens space.