Klaus Niederkrüger (Toulouse):Topology of symplectic fillings

ABSTRACTS: Contact manifolds often occur naturally as boundaries of complex or symplectic manifolds. An interesting question is in how far a given contact manifold might appear as boundary of several different symplectic manifolds, and if there are restrictions on the topology of the possible symplectic "fillings". In this talk, I will explain how Gromov's pseudo-holomorphic curve techniques allow us to prove some (old and new) results in this direction.