Topological full groups

Series
Colloquia
Time
Tuesday, November 17, 2015 - 10:05am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Professor Volodymyr Nekrashevych – Department of Mathematics, Texas A&M – nekrash@math.tamu.eduhttp://www.math.tamu.edu/~nekrash/
Organizer
Jean Bellissard

Please Note: This talk should interest people in Algebra, Dynamical Systems and Mathematical Physics in addition to Geometry and Topology. Volodia Nekrashevych will visit Atlanta from Sunday November 15th evening until Tuesday November 17th afternoon. He will be available for private talks on Monday November 14th after noon or on Tueasday morning before 10AM. Contact him directly by email or contact jeanbel@math.gatech.edu to schedule a meeting or to have a dinner with him.

Topological full groups are naturally associated with semigroups of local homeomorphisms: iterations of a single homeomorphism, holonomy groupoids of laminations, groupoids of local isomorphisms of quasiperiodic sets (for example Penrose tilings), etc. Some of these groups have interesting properties from the point of view of group theory. For instance, they provide first examples of amenable infinite simple finitely generated groups (by a result of K. Juschenko and N. Monod) and first examples of simple amenable groups of Burnside type. The full group of the Penrose tiling is another interesting example from the point of view of amenability.