Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Curve operators and Toeplitz operators in TQFT.

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Friday, November 19, 2010 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 171
Speaker
Julien Marche – Paris VII & Ecole Polytechnique
Topological quantum field theory associates to a surface a sequence of vector spaces and to curves on the surface, sequence of operators on that spaces. It is expected that these operators are Toeplitz although there is no general proof. I will state it in some particular cases and give applications to the asymptotics of quantum invariants like quantum 6-j symbols or quantum invariants of Dehn fillings of the figure eight knot. This is work in progress with (independently) L. Charles and T. Paul.

Dilatation vs self-intersection number for point-pushing pseudo-Anosovs

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, November 15, 2010 - 17:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Room 326, Boyd Graduate Studies (UGA)
Speaker
Spencer Dowdall – University of Chicago –
This talk is about the dilatations of pseudo-Anosov mapping classes obtained by pushing a marked point around a filling curve. After reviewing this "point-pushing" construction, I will give both upper and lower bounds on the dilatation in terms of the self-intersection number of the filling curve. I'll also give bounds on the least dilatation of any pseudo-Anosov in the point-pushing subgroup and describe the asymptotic dependence on self-intersection number. All of the upper bounds involve analyzing explicit examples using train tracks, and the lower bound is obtained by lifting to the universal cover and studying the images of simple closed curves.

Semi-infinite cycles in Floer Theory

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, November 15, 2010 - 15:45 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Room 326, Boyd Graduate Studies (UGA)
Speaker
Max Lipyanskiy – Columbia University

Please Note: This is the first talk in the Emory-Ga Tech-UGA joint seminar. The second talk will begin at 5:00. (NOTE: These talks are on the UGA campus.)

I will survey the program of realizing various versions of Floer homology as a theory of geometric cycles. This involves the description of infinite dimensional manifolds mapping to the relevant configuration spaces. This approach, which goes back to Atiyah's address at the Herman Weyl symposium, is in some ways technically simpler than the traditional construction based on Floer's version of Morse theory. In addition, it opens up the possibility of defining more refined invariants such as bordism andK-theory.

Homology torsion growth, hyperbolic volume, and Mahler measure

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, November 8, 2010 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Thang Le – GaTech
We prove a conjecture of K. Schmidt in algebraic dynamical system theory onthe growth of the number of components of fixed point sets. We also prove arelated conjecture of Silver and Williams on the growth of homology torsions offinite abelian covering of link complements. In both cases, the growth isexpressed by the Mahler measure of the first non-zero Alexander polynomial ofthe corresponding modules. In the case of non-ablian covering, the growth of torsion is less thanor equal to the hyperbolic volume (or Gromov norm) of the knot complement.

Knots, Heegaard Floer Homology and Contact Geometry

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Friday, November 5, 2010 - 14:00 for 2 hours
Location
Skiles 171
Speaker
Vera Vertesi – MIT

Please Note: The talk is 1.5-2 hours long, and although some knowledge of HeegaardFloer homology and contact manifolds is useful I will spend some time inthe begining to review the basic notions. So the talk should be accessibleto everyone.

The first hour of this talk gives a gentle introduction to yet another version of Heegaard Floer homology; Sutured Floer homology. This is the generalization of Heegaard Floer homology, for 3-manifolds with decorations (sutures) on their boundary. Sutures come naturally for contact 3-manifolds. Later we will concentrate on invariants for contact 3--manifolds in Heegaard Floer homology. This can be defined both for closed 3--manifolds, in this case they live in Heegaard Floer homology and for 3--manifolds with boundary, when the invariant is in sutured Floer homology. There are two natural generalizations of these invariants for Legendrain knots. One can directly generalize the definition of the contact invariant $\widehat{\mathcal{L}}$, or one can take the complement of the knot, and compute the invariant for that:$\textrm{EH}$. At the end of this talk I would like to describe a map that sends $\textrm{EH}$ to$\widehat{\mathcal{L}}$. This is a joint work with Andr\'as Stipsicz.

Commensurability classes of $(-2,3,n)$ pretzel knot complements

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Friday, November 5, 2010 - 11:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Thomas Mattman – California State University, Chico –
(joint work with M. Macasieb) Let $K$ be a hyperbolic $(-2, 3, n)$ pretzel knot and $M = S^3 \setminus K$ its complement. For these knots, we verify a conjecture of Reid and Walsh: there are at most three knotcomplements in the commensurability class of $M$. Indeed, if $n \neq 7$, weshow that $M$ is the unique knot complement in its class.

A polynomial invariant of pseudo-Anosov maps

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, October 25, 2010 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Joan Birman – Barnard College-Columbia University –
Pseudo-Anosov mapping classes on surfaces have a rich structure, uncovered by William Thurston in the 1980's. We will discuss the 1995 Bestvina-Handel algorithmic proof of Thurston's theorem, and in particular the "transition matrix" T that their algorithm computes. We study the Bestvina-Handel proof carefully, and show that the dilatation is the largest real root of a particular polynomial divisor P(x) of the characteristic polynomial C(x) = | xI-T |. While C(x) is in general not an invariant of the mapping class, we prove that P(x) is. The polynomial P(x) contains the minimum polynomial M(x) of the dilatation as a divisor, however it does not in general coincide with M(x).In this talk we will review the background and describe the mathematics that underlies the new invariant. This represents joint work with Peter Brinkmann and Keiko Kawamuro.

The degree of the colored Jones polynomial of a knot

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, October 11, 2010 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Stavros Garoufalidis – Georgia Tech –
Given a knot, a simple Lie algebra L and an irreducible representation V of L one can construct a one-variable polynomial with integer coefficients. When L is the simplest simple Lie algebra (sl_2) this gives a sequence of polynomials, whose sequence of degrees is a quadratic quasi-polynomial. We will discuss a conjecture for the degree of the colored Jones polynomial for an arbitrary simple Lie algebra, and we will give evidence for sl_3. This is joint work with Thao Vuong.

Legendrian contact homology for Seifert fibered spaces

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, October 4, 2010 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Joan Licata – Stanford University
In this talk, I'll focus on Seifert fibered spaces whose fiber structure is realized by the Reeb orbits of an appropriate contact form. I'll describe a rigorous combinatorial formulation of Legendrian contact homology for Legendrian knots in these manifolds. This work is joint with J. Sabloff.

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