Giovanni Russo, Florida International University
"Nearly Kahler metrics and torus symmetry"
Amanda Petcu, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo
"Partial progress on a conjecture of Donaldson by Fine and Yao"
Michael Albanese, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo
"Handles"
We introduce handles as the fundamental building blocks of manifolds and begin to discuss the notion of a handle decomposition. The discussion will apply to all dimensions.
MC 5403
Schedule: Tuesdays at 12pm in MC5403 and Thursdays at 1pm in MC5417.
Description: Loosely speaking, sieving consists in slowly removing undesirable elements from an initial set and estimating the size of the remaining set. A common example is Erathostene’s sieve where, to count how many primes there are between 1 and N, one first removes numbers which are divisible by two, then those divisible by three, and so on.
Thomas Bray, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo
"Free Products of von Neumann Algebras"
I will speak about free products of von Neumann algebras. The goal is to speak about a recent paper of Boutonnet, Drimbe, Ioana, and Popa which solves a non-separable version of the free group factor problem.
MC 5417
Organizational Meeting
We will discuss/determine the time this seminar will be held this term as well as determine the first set of speakers. If you wish to have input or wish to talk and are unable to attend please contact Robert Harris or Yash Singh.
MC 5403
Stuart White, Oxford University
"Simple amenable C*-algebras"
C*-algebras are norm closed self-adjoint algebras of bounded operators on Hilbert space, and so arise naturally from unitary representations of groups and group actions, amongst other constructions. Large scale work of many researchers over decades has recently culminated in a definitive classification theorem for simple amenable C*-algebras of finite topological dimension.
Organizational Meeting
We will discuss the format of the seminar and potential goals for the semester.
MC 5403
Tomer Zimhoni, Ben Gurion University
"Random Permutations from Free Products"
Talk #1 (1:00-2:30pm)
Ruxandra Moraru, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo
"Hitchin pairs on higher-dimensional manifolds"