Week of Events
Algebraic Geometry Seminar: Charlie Wu (Toronto)
Title: Compact components of character varietiesAbstract: Relative character varieties of surface groups are varieties which parametrize representations of the fundamental group of a surface with prescribed behavior the punctures of the surface. In the 90s, Benedetto and Goldman discovered a surprising compact component of a (real) relative character variety, later generalized by the work of Deroin-Tholozan and […]
Topology Seminar: Yoon Seok Chae (California Institute of Technology)
Title: Knot complements, series invariants and Lie superalgebra Abstract: Inspired by the categorification program for a numerical invariant of three-manifolds at roots of unity, series invariants for closed manifolds and for knot complements were introduced. This in turn motivated an extension of the series invariant of the former case to Lie superalgebras. It was recently generalized […]
Number Theory Seminar: Naomi Sweeting (Princeton University)
Title: On the Bloch–Kato Conjecture for some four-dimensional symplectic Galois representations Abstract: The Bloch–Kato Conjecture predicts a relation between Selmer ranks and orders of vanishing of L-functions for Galois representations arising from etale cohomology of algebraic varieties. In this talk, I’ll describe results towards this conjecture in ranks 0 and 1 for the self-dual Galois representations […]
Geometric analysis seminar: Richard A. Wentworth
Title: Z/2 harmonic 1-forms and harmonic maps to trees Abstract: The notion of a Z/2 harmonic 1-form (or spinor) was introduced by Taubes, who showed that they appear as limiting objects of the space of flat SL(2,C) connections on closed 3-manifolds. They similarly appear in other gauge theoretic situations that exhibit noncompact phenomena. Understanding their structure […]