Geometry and Topology Seminar 2019-2020

The Geometry and Topology seminar meets in room 901 of Van Vleck Hall on Fridays from 1:20pm - 2:10pm.
For more information, contact Richard Kent.

Fall 2012

date	speaker	title	host(s)
September 7
September 14
September 21
September 28
October 5	Ben Schmidt (Michigan State)	Three manifolds of constant vector curvature.	Dymarz
October 12
October 19
October 26	Jo Nelson (Wisconsin)	Cylindrical contact homology as a well-defined homology theory? Part I	local
November 2	Jennifer Taback (Bowdoin)	TBA	Dymarz
November 9
November 16
Thanksgiving Recess
November 30	Shinpei Baba (Caltech)	TBA	Kent
December 7	Kathryn Mann (Chicago)	TBA	Kent
December 14

Fall Abstracts

Ben Schmidt (Michigan State)

"Three manifolds of constant vector curvature."

A Riemannian manifold M is said to have extremal curvature K if all sectional curvatures are bounded above by K or if all sectional curvatures are bounded below by K. A manifold with extremal curvature K has constant vector curvature K if every tangent vector to M belongs to a tangent plane of curvature K. For surfaces, having constant vector curvature is equivalent to having constant curvature. In dimension three, the eight Thurston geometries all have constant vector curvature. In this talk, I will discuss the classification of closed three manifolds with constant vector curvature. Based on joint work with Jon Wolfson.

Jo Nelson (Wisconsin)

Cylindrical contact homology as a well-defined homology theory? Part I

In this talk I will define all the concepts in the title, starting with what a contact manifold is. I will also explain how the heuristic arguments sketched in the literature since 1999 fail to define a homology theory and provide a foundation for a well-defined cylindrical contact homology, while still providing an invariant of the contact structure. A later talk will provide us with a large class of examples under which one can compute a well-defined version of cylindrical contact homology via a new approach the speaker developed for her thesis that is distinct and completely independent of previous specialized attempts.

Jennifer Taback (Bowdoin)

TBA

Shinpei Baba (Caltech)

TBA

Kathryn Mann (Chicago)

TBA

Spring 2013

date	speaker	title	host(s)
January 25
February 1
February 8
February 15
February 22
March 1
March 8
March 15
March 22	Michelle Lee (Michigan)	TBA	Kent
Spring Break
April 5
April 12
April 19
April 26
May 3
May 10

Spring Abstracts

Michelle Lee (Michigan)

TBA

Archive of past Geometry seminars

2011-2012: Geometry_and_Topology_Seminar_2011-2012

2010: Fall-2010-Geometry-Topology