Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

There are two simple ways to construct new surface bundles over surfaces from old ones, namely, we can connect sum along the base or the fiber. In joint work with Inanc Baykur, we construct explicit surface bundles over surfaces that are indecomposable in both senses. This is achieved by first translating the problem into one about embeddings of surface groups into mapping class groups.

Hyperbolic polynomials are real polynomials that can be thought of as generalized determinants. Each such polynomial determines a convex cone, the hyperbolicity cone. It is an open problem whether every hyperbolicity cone can be realized as a linear slice of the cone of psd matrices. We discuss the state of the art on this problem and describe an inner approximation for a hyperbolicity cone via a sums of squares relaxation that becomes exact if the hyperbolic polynomial possesses a symmetric determinantal representation. (Based on work in progress with Cynthia Vinzant)