Persistent Legendrian Contact Homology

This talk will report on an REU whose goal was to introduce the notion of persistence into Legendrian contact homology. The LCH of a Legendrian knot is computed as the homology of the knot's Chekanov-Eliashberg DGA and is a well-studied invariant of Legendrian isotopy types. For a given Legendrian embedding, the Chekanov-Eliashberg DGA admits a natural filtration, allowing for the computation of persistent homology. The purpose of this REU was to initiate the study of the resulting filtered homology. The project was joint with M. Basu, E. Clayton, D. Irvine, F. Mooers, and W. Shen.