Two knots are concordant to each other if they cobound an annulus in the product of S^3. We will discuss a few basic facts about knot concordance and look at J. Levine’s classical result on the knot concordance group.
Finding fillings of contact structures is a question that has been studied extensively over the last few decades. In this talk I will discuss some motivations for studying this question, and then visit a few ideas involved in the earliest results, due to Eliashberg and McDuff, that paved the way for a lot of current research in this direction.
How can we recognize a map given certain combinatorial data? The Alexander method gives us the answer for self-homeomorphisms of finite-type surfaces. We can determine a homeomorphism of a surface (up to isotopy) based on how it acts on a finite number of curves. However, is there a way to apply this concept to recognize maps on other spaces? The answer is yes for a special class of maps, post-critically finite quadratic polynomials on the complex plane (Belk-Lanier-Margalit-Winarski).
In this talk, we will discuss Belk-Lanier-Margalit-Winarski’s methods, as well zome difficulties we face when trying to extend their methods to other settings.
An infinite-type surface is a surface whose fundamental group is not finitely generated. These surfaces are “big,” having either infinite genus or infinitely many punctures. Recently, it was shown that mapping class groups of these infinite-type surfaces have a wealth of subgroups; for example, there are infinitely many surfaces whose mapping class group contains every countable group as a subgroup. By extending a theorem for finite-type surfaces to the infinite-type case — the Nielsen realization problem — we give topological obstructions to continuous embeddings of topological groups, with a few interesting examples.
Every closed 3-manifold admits foliations, where the leaves are surfaces. For a given 3-manifold, which surfaces can appear as leaves? Kerékjártó and Richards gave a classification up to homeomorphism of noncompact surfaces, which includes surfaces with infinite genus and infinitely many punctures. In their 1985 paper "Every surface is a leaf", Cantwell--Conlon prove that for every orientable noncompact surface L and every closed 3-manifold M, M has a foliation where L appears as a leaf. We will discuss their paper and construction and the surrounding context.
In the setting of manifolds with connected torus boundary, we can reinterpret bordered invariants as immersed curves in the once punctured torus. This machinery, due to Hanselman, Rasmussen, and Watson, is particularly useful in the context of knot complements. We will show how a type D structure can be viewed as a multicurve in the boundary of a manifold, and we will consider how the operation of cabling acts on this new invariant. If time permits, we will discuss how to extract concordance invariants from the curves.
Bordered Floer homology, due to Lipshitz, Ozsváth, and Thurston, is a Heegaard Floer homology theory for 3-manifolds with connected boundary. This theory associates to the boundary surface (with suitable parameterization) a differential graded algebra A(Z). Our invariant comes in two versions: a left differential (type D) module over A(Z), or its dual, a right A-infinity (type A) module over A(Z). In this talk, we will focus on the case of 3-manifolds with torus boundary, and will explicitly describe how to compute type D structures of knot complements.
Continuing the theme of Hopf algebras, we will discuss a recipe by Reshetikhin and Turaev for link invariants using representations of quantum groups, which are non-commutative, non-cocommutative Hopf algebras. In the simplest case with the spin 1/2 representation of quantum sl2, we recover the Kauffman bracket and the Jones polynomial when combined with writhe. Time permitting, we will also talk about colored Jones polynomials and connections to 3-manifold invariants.
In 1941, Hopf gave a proof of the fact that the rational cohomology of a compact connected Lie group is isomorphic to the cohomology of a product of odd dimensional spheres. The proof is natural in the sense that instead of using the classification of Lie groups, it utilizes the extra algebraic structures, now known as Hopf algebras. In this talk, we will discuss the algebraic background and the proof of the theorem.
In this talk we will survey some of the developments of Cheeger and Colding’s conjecture on a sequence of n dimensional manifolds with uniform two sides Ricci Curvature bound, investigated by Anderson, Tian, Cheeger, Colding and Naber among others. The conjecture states that every Gromov-Hausdorff limit of the above-mentioned sequence, which is a metric space with singularities, has the singular set with Hausdorff codimension at least 4. This conjecture was proved by Colding-Naber in 2014, where the ideas and techniques like \epsilon-regularity theory, almost splitting and quantitative stratification were extensively used. I will give an introduction of the background of the conjecture and talk about the idea of the part of the proof that deals with codimension 2 singularities.
