Paul Seidel

Abstract:   We will consider some questions about Lagrangian submanifolds of symplectic manifolds, restricting ourselves to a basic case, namely that of cotangent bundles. This was one of the original motivations for the introduction of cohomological (Floer theory) methods into symplectic topology, and a number of interesting partial results were obtained (Lalonde-Sikorav, Viterbo, Biran, among others). More recently, the area has received a new impetus from ideas of Donaldson and Fukaya-Smith, which bring us closer to understanding the "big picture".