Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Braid Groups and Hodge Theory

Series
Geometry Topology Student Seminar
Time
Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - 14:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Becca Winarski – Georgia Tech
We look at a paper of McMullen "Braid Groups and Hodge Theory" exploring representations of braid groups and their connections to arithemetic lattices.

Stein fillings of planar open books.

Series
Geometry Topology Student Seminar
Time
Wednesday, October 31, 2012 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006.
Speaker
Amey Kaloti – Georgia Tech
The goal of this talk is to study geography and classification problem for Stein fillings of contact structures supported by planar open books. In the first part we will prove that for contact structures supported by planar open books Stein fillings have a finite geography. In the second part we will outline an approach to classify Stein fillings of manifolds supported by planar open books.

Toric Manifolds - Four Dimensions from Two

Series
Geometry Topology Student Seminar
Time
Wednesday, September 12, 2012 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Jamie Conway – Georgia Tech
We will investigate a method of "seeing" properties of four dimensional symplectic spaces by looking at two dimensional pictures. We will see how to calculate the Euler characteristic, identify embedded surfaces, see intersection numbers, and how to see induced contact structures on the boundary of these manifolds.

Topological entropy of automorphisms of free groups

Series
Geometry Topology Student Seminar
Time
Wednesday, September 5, 2012 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Hyunshik Shin – School of Mathematics
The main goal is to characterize the dilatation of an outer automorphisms of free groups. It is known that for any automorphism, its dilatation is a weak Perron number. The converse was recently shown by Thurston; for every weak Perron number, there is an automorphism represented by a train track map. We will discuss Thurston's theorem and its proof.

Train track and automorphisms of free groups

Series
Geometry Topology Student Seminar
Time
Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Hyunshik Shin – School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech
We will discuss the basics of automorphisms of free groups and train track structure. We will define the growth rate which is a topological entropy of the train track map.

Gel'fand Duality

Series
Geometry Topology Student Seminar
Time
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - 14:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 169
Speaker
Jonathan Paprocki – Georgia Tech
We will prove a duality between locally compact Hausdorff spaces and the C*-algebra of continuous complex-valued functions on that space. Formally, this is the equivalence of the opposite category of commutative C*-algebras and the category of locally compact Hausdorff spaces.

Characteristic Classes

Series
Geometry Topology Student Seminar
Time
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Bulent Tosun – Georgia Tech
The aim of the talk is to give a complete proof of the fact that any closed oriented 3-manifold has a trivial tangent bundle.

Rays and Souls in Von Mangoldt Planes

Series
Geometry Topology Student Seminar
Time
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - 14:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Eric Choi – Emory University
Knowledge of rays and critical points of infinity in von Mangoldt planes can be applied to understanding the structure of open complete manifolds with lower radial curvature bounds. We will show how the set of souls is computed for every von Mangoldt plane of nonnegative curvature. We will also make some observations on the structure of the set of critical points of infinity for von Mangoldt planes with negative curvature.

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