Georgia Institute of Technology School of Mathematics | Georgia Institute of Technology | Atlanta, GA

A group is said to be torsion-free if it has no elements of finite order.  An example is the group, under composition, of self-homeomorphisms (continuous maps with continuous inverses) of the interval I = [0, 1] fixed on the boundary {0, 1}.  In fact this group has the stronger property of being left-orderable, meaning that the elements of the group can be ordered in a way that is nvariant under left-multiplication.  If one restricts to piecewise-linear (PL) homeomorphisms, there exists a two-sided (bi-)ordering, an even stronger property of groups.

I will discuss joint work with Danny Calegari concerning groups of homeomorphisms of the cube [0, 1]^n fixed on the boundary.  In the PL category, this group is left-orderable, but not bi-orderable, for all n>1.  Also I will report on recent work of James Hyde showing that left-orderability fails for n>1 in the topological category.  

 One strategy for developing a proof of a claimed theorem is to start by understanding what a counter-example should look like.  In this talk, we will discuss a few recent results in harmonic analysis that utilize a quantitative version of this approach.  A key step is the solution of an inverse problem with the following flavor.  Let $T:X \to Y$ be a bounded linear operator and let $0 < a \leq \|T\|$.  What can we say about those functions $f \in X$ obeying the reverse inequality $\|Tf\|_Y \geq a\|f\|_X$?  

The classical isoperimetric inequality states that in Euclidean space spheres provide unique enclosures of least perimeter for any given volume. In this talk we discuss how this inequality may be extended to spaces of nonpositive curvature, known as Cartan-Hadamard manifolds, as conjectured by Aubin, Gromov, Burago, and Zalgaller in 1970s and 80s. The proposed proof is based on a comparison formula for total curvature of level sets in Riemannian manifolds, and estimates for the smooth approximation of the signed distance function, via inf-convolution and Reilly type formulas among other techniques. Immediate applications include sharp extensions of Sobolev and Faber-Krahn inequalities to spaces of nonpositive curvature. This is joint work with Joel Spruck.