  These notes were prepared to supplement the talk that I gave on Feb 19, 2004,
at the First East Asian School of Knots and Related Topics, Seoul, South Korea.
In this article I review aspects of the interconnections between braids, knots
and contact structures on Euclidean 3-space. I discuss my recent work with
William Menasco (arXiv math.GT/0310279)} and (arXiv math.GT/0310280). In the
latter we prove that there are distinct transversal knot types in contact
3-space having the same topological knot type and the same Bennequin invariant.
