Skewloops, quadrics, and curvature

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, March 14, 2011 - 2:05pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Bruce Solomon – Indiana University – solomon@indiana.eduhttp://mypage.iu.edu/~solomon/IU_Site/Home.html
Organizer
Mohammad Ghomi
A smooth loop in 3-space is skew if it has no pair of parallel tangent lines. With M.~Ghomi, we proved some years ago that among surfaces with some positive Gauss curvature (i.e., local convexity) the absence of skewloops characterizes quadrics. The relationship between skewloops and negatively curved surfaces has proven harder to analyze, however. We report some recent progress on that problem, including evidence both for and against the possibility that the absence of skewloops characterizes quadricsamong surfaces with negative curvature.