Essential spunnormal surfaces via tropical geometry

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, October 7, 2013 - 2:05pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Andrew Brasile – University of Illinois at Chicago – abrasi2@math.uic.eduhttp://homepages.math.uic.edu/~abrasi2/Andrew_Brasile_%28UIC%29/Welcome.html
Organizer
Stavros Garoufalidis
In a paper published in 2012, Nathan Dunfield and StavrosGaroufalidis gave simple, sufficient conditions for a spunnormal surface tobe essential in a compact, orientable 3-manifold with torus boundary. Thistalk will discuss a generalization of this result which utilizes a theoremfrom tropical geometry.