In this paper, we prove contact Poincaré and Sobolev inequalities in Heisenberg groups $\mathbb{H}^{n}$, where the word ‘contact’ is meant to stress that de Rham’s exterior differential is replaced by the exterior differential of the so-called Rumin complex $(E_{0}^{\bullet },d_{c})$, which recovers the scale invariance under the group dilations associated with the stratification of the Lie algebra of $\mathbb{H}^{n}$. In addition, we construct smoothing operators for differential forms on sub-Riemannian contact manifolds with bounded geometry, which act trivially on cohomology. For instance, this allows us to replace a closed form, up to adding a controlled exact form, with a much more regular differential form.

In this paper, we introduce two quantities defined on a surface in a contact manifold. The first one is called degree of transversality $(\text{DOT})$, which measures the transversality between the tangent spaces of a surface and the contact planes. The second quantity, called curvature of transversality $(\text{COT})$, is designed to give a comparison principle for $\text{DOT}$ along characteristic curves under bounds on $\text{COT}$. In particular, this gives estimates on lengths of characteristic curves, assuming $\text{COT}$ is bounded below by a positive constant.

We show that surfaces with constant $\text{COT}$ exist, and we classify all graphs in the Heisenberg group with vanishing $\text{COT}$. This is accomplished by showing that the equation for graphs with zero $\text{COT}$ can be decomposed into two first order PDEs, one of which is the backward invisicid Burgers’ equation. Finally we show that the p-minimal graph equation in the Heisenberg group also has such a decomposition. Moreover, we can use this decomposition to write down an explicit formula of a solution near a regular point.

We give a characterization of contact manifolds in terms of symplectic Lie–Rinehart–Jacobi algebras. We also give a sufficient condition for a Jacobi manifold to be a contact manifold.

The study of the Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian knots was started by D. Fuchs and S. Tabachnikov who showed that the groups of C-valued Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian and of framed knots in the standard contact R3 are canonically isomorphic. Recently we constructed the first examples of contact 3-manifolds where Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian and of framed knots are different. Moreover in these examples Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian knots distinguish Legendrian knots that are isotopic as framed knots and homotopic as Legendrian immersions. This raised the question what information about Legendrian knots can be captured using Vassiliev invariants. Here we answer this question by showing that for any contact 3-manifold with a cooriented contact structure the groups of Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian knots and of knots that are nowhere tangent to a vector field that coorients the contact structure are canonically isomorphic.

We consider germs of mappings of a line to contact space and classify the first simple singularities up to the action of contactomorphisms in the target space and diffeomorphisms of the line. Even in these first cases there arises a new interesting interaction of local commutative algebra with contact structure.