Applications of contact surgery (Q1360144)

A contact manifold is a smooth odd dimensional manifold with a maximally non-integrable hyperplane distribution. The study of contact manifolds is now one of the most active areas in topology. Then the notion of ``contact surgery'' is important for making new examples of contact manifolds and for attacking the existence problem of contact structures on manifolds with almost contact structures. In this article the author provides a nice review on contact surgery with full historical backgrounds. Moreover, the author gives a correct proof to the author's previous result on the existence of contact structures on certain \((n-1)\)-connected manifolds of dimension \(2n+1\).