Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I will discuss a process called a cork twist for relating homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic smooth 4-manifolds. This involves finding a contractible submanifold of a given 4-manifold, removing it, and re-gluing by a diffeomorphism of the boundary. This is a surprisingly simple way of relating non-diffeomorphic manifold that was discovered in the 1990s but has recently been getting a lot of attention.