Spiro Karigiannis, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo
"The geometry of G2 manifolds: a marriage of non-associative algebra and non-linear analysis"
This is a practice run for a colloquium talk that I am giving at Florida International University during reading week. I want to make sure it is pitched at the right level for a general colloquium, and also that it does not go over the allotted time of 50 minutes. So I would welcome any useful feedback that you can give me. However, it should also be a useful introduction to G2 manifolds for graduate students who are not experts on the subject. Here is the official abstract:
I will spend the first part of the talk giving a gentle introduction to G2 manifolds, with a special emphasis on their similarities and differences with Kahler manifolds. In the second part, I will focus on some recent work with Daren Cheng (Miami) and Jesse Madnick (Oregon) on the analytic properties of a special class of maps into G2 manifolds, which are analogues of J-holomorphic maps in Kahler geometry. The talk should be accessible to a general mathematical audience.
MC 5479