Alejandra Vicente-Colmenares
“The geometry of Yang-Mills fields, Part 08”
Throughout the spring 2013 term, we will (as a group) be reading through and lecturing on ”The Geometry of Yang-Mills Fields” by Sir Michael Atiyah. All are welcome to attend.
Spiro Karigiannis
“A taste of comparison geometry”
Comparison geometry is a general technique where one can obtain quantitative estimates about the curvature of a Riemannian manifold, by comparing it with the geometry of certain ”model” spaces. Such estimates often lead to striking conclusions about the global topology of the underlying manifold. I will discuss some results from comparison geometry, such as the Bishop Comparison theorem and/or the Poincar inequality for the first eigenvalue of the Laplacian.