Introduction to Branched Covers
- Series
- Geometry Topology Student Seminar
- Time
- Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 005
- Speaker
- Meredith Casey – Georgia Tech
The main purpose of this talk is to better understand how to use branched covers to construct 3-manifolds. We will start with branched covers of 2-manifolds, carefully working through examples and learning the technology. Using these methods in combination with open book decompositions we will show how to construct 3-manifolds by branching over link and knots in S^{3}. Particular emphasis will be placed on using the map to get a "coloring" of the branched locus and how this combinatorial data is useful both for explicit constructions and for the general theory.