Alvaro de Pino Gómez (Universiteit Utrecht) will speak in the geometry seminar on the 20th of February. The time and place of the talk are to be confirmed. Alvaro’ title is “Overtwisted Engel structures” and the abstract is below.
I will describe an analogue of the Lutz twist for Engel structures and I will explain how in the Engel world, much like in 3-dimensional contact topology, one can define the overtwisted disc to be a portion of a Lutz tube. This is joint work with T. Vogel.
I will assume no prior knowledge of Engel structures and I will dedicate a large part of the talk to explaining how Engel structures can be regarded as a “non-holonomic” analogue of 3-dimensional contact structures. From this perspective, the definition of overtwistedness is fairly natural.