Surgery on Contact 3-Manifolds and Stein Surfaces

The groundbreaking results of the near past - Donaldson''s result on Lef­ schetz pencils on symplectic manifolds and Giroux''s correspondence be­ tween contact structures and open book decompositions - brought a top­ ological flavor to global symplectic and contact geometry. This topological aspect is strengthened by the existing results of Weinstein and Eliashberg (and Gompf in dimension 4) on ha...