Contact structures in dimension 3 and the Seiberg-Witten equations

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Clifford Taubes, Harvard University
Fine Hall 314

I hope to give some indication of how the Seiberg-Witten equations are used to study the dynamics of vector fields on 3-dimensional manifolds. One result of this research is a proof of Alan Weinstein's conjecture about the existence of closed integral curves of the Reeb vector field for a contact 1-form.