Fully irreducible outer automorphisms of the outer automorphism group of a free group

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Friday, February 17, 2012 - 2:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Alexandra Pettet – University of British Columbia
Organizer
Dan Margalit
The outer automorphism group Out(F) of a non-abelian free group F of finite rank shares many properties with linear groups and the mapping class group Mod(S) of a surface, although the techniques for studying Out(F) are often quite different from the latter two. Motivated by analogy, I will present some results about Out(F) previously well-known for the mapping class group, and highlight some of the features in the proofs which distinguish it from Mod(S).