Knots and contact geometry. I: Torus knots and the figure eight knot. (Q1872792)

Eliashberg and Fraser proved that for Legendrian unknots the Thurston-Bennequin invariant and the rotation number determine the Legendrian isotopy type. Prior to this paper similar results for other Legendrian knot types were unknown. The authors show that two oriented Legendrian tori or figure eight knots (in the standard contact \(S^3\)) are Legendrian isotopic provided that their Thurston-Bennequin invariants, rotation numbers and unframed knot types agree. As a corollary they get that two transversal tori or figure eight knots (in the standard contact \(S^3\)) are transversally isotopic if their self-linking numbers and knot types agree. For torus knots this corollary is a special case of the Birman-Wrinkle-Menasco result on the classification of transversal iterated torus knots. For transversal unknots such a result was first obtained by Eliashberg and for positive transversal torus knots by the first author John Etnyre.