- Series
- School of Mathematics Colloquium
- Time
- Friday, December 4, 2020 - 3:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- ONLINE
- Speaker
- Bena Tshishiku – Brown University
- Organizer
- Dan Margalit
Please Note: This is the opening talk of the 2020 Tech Topology Conference http://ttc.gatech.edu
For a manifold M, the (generalized) Nielsen realization problem asks if the surjection Diff(M) → π_0 Diff(M) is split, where Diff(M) is the diffeomorphism group. When M is a surface, this question was posed by Thurston in Kirby's problem list and was addressed by Morita. I will discuss some more recent work on Nielsen realization problems with connections to flat fiber bundles, K3 surfaces, and smooth structures on hyperbolic manifolds.