First talk of a series of 3 talks by Nicholas Zufelt.
Abstract: The notion of orderability of groups is not a new one. Why then, has the idea come into the forefront of discussion in the area of 3-manifold topology in the last few years? As we will discuss in this series of talks, there seems to be a very strong connection between orderability of the fundamental group of 3-manfiolds, the topology of 3-manifolds (in the form of foliations), and geometry of 3-manifolds (in the form of the symplectically-defined Heegaard Floer homology). This is attractive for many reasons, not the least of which is that each of these areas have proven to be extremely useful in individually answering questions in low-dimensional topology, and there is a great deal of hope that when working in tandem, they can accomplish much more.