Open Book Foliations
  We study open book foliations on surfaces in 3-manifolds, and give applications to contact geometry of dimension 3. We prove a braid-theoretic formula of the self-linking number of transverse links, which reveals an unexpected link to the Johnson-Morita homomorphism in mapping class group theory. We also give an alternative combinatorial proof to the Bennequin-Eliashberg inequality. 
Tetsuya Ito and Keiko Kawamuro
math.GT math.SG