Finding hyperbolic-like behavior in non-hyperbolic spaces

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - 3:30pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Clary theater
Speaker
Ruth Charney – Brandeis University – charney@brandeis.eduhttp://people.brandeis.edu/~charney/
Organizer
Michael Damron
In the early '90s, Gromov introduced a notion of hyperbolicity for geodesic metric spaces. The study of groups of isometries of such spaces has been an underlying theme in much of the work in geometric group theory since that time. Many geodesic metric spaces, while not hyperbolic in the sense of Gromov, nonetheless display some hyperbolic-like behavior. I will discuss a new invariant, the Morse boundary of a space, which captures this behavior. (Joint work with Harold Sultan and Matt Cordes.)