Whitney Towers, Higher Order Intersections, and Tree-Valued Invariants

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, September 17, 2021 - 2:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Miriam Kuzbary – Georgia Tech
Organizer
John Etnyre

In this pair of talks I will survey some of the machinery developed by Conant, Schneiderman, and Teichner to study Whitney towers, and their applications to the study of knot and link concordance. Whitney towers can be thought of as measuring the failure of the Whitney trick in dimension 4 and can be used, in a sense, to approximate slice disks. The talks will be based on various papers of Schneiderman, Conant-Schneiderman-Teichner, Cochran-Orr-Teichner and lecture notes by those authors.