Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The goal of this talk is to explain the sense in which the natural algebraic structure of the singular chains on a path-connected space determines its fundamental group functorially. This new basic piece about the algebraic topology of spaces, which tells us that the fundamental group may be determined from homological data, has several interesting and deep implications. An example of a corollary of our statement is the following extension of a classical theorem of Whitehead: a continuous map between path-connected pointed topological spaces is a weak homotopy equivalence if and only if the induced map between the differential graded coalgebras of singular chains is a Koszul weak equivalence (i.e. a quasi-isomorphism after applying the cobar functor). A deeper implication, which is work in progress, is that this allows us to give a complete description of infinity groupoids in terms of homological algebra.

There are three main ingredients that come into play in order to give a precise formulation and proof of our main statement: 1) we extend a classical result of F. Adams from 1956 regarding the “cobar construction” as an algebraic model for the based loop space of a simply connected space, 2) we make use of the homotopical symmetry of the chain approximations to the diagonal map on a space, and 3) we apply a duality theory for algebraic structures known as Koszul duality. This is joint work with Mahmoud Zeinalian and Felix Wierstra.

The cosmetic surgery conjecture states that no two different Dehn surgeries on a given knot produce the same oriented 3-manifold (such a pair of surgeries is called purely cosmetic). For knots in S^3, I will describe how knot Floer homology provides a strong obstruction to the existence of purely cosmetic surgeries. For many knots, including all alternating knots with genus not equal to two as well as all but 337 of the first 1.7 million knots, this is enough to confirm the conjecture. For the remaining knots, all but finitely many surgery slopes are obstructed, so checking the conjecture for a given knot reduces to distinguishing finitely many pairs of manifolds. Using a computer search, the conjecture has been verified for all prime knots with up to 16 crossings, as well as for arbitrary connected sums of such knots. These results significantly improve on earlier work of Ni and Wu, who also used Heegaard Floer homology to obstruct purely cosmetic surgeries. The improvement comes from using the full graded Heegaard Floer invariant, which is facilitated by a recent recasting of knot Floer homology as a collection of immersed curves in the punctured torus.