Pure Math Grad Colloquium

Hanming Liu, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"Living inside 3-manifolds"

Day to day life gives us a pretty good idea of what it is like living inside 3-dimensional Euclidean space. But what about other 3-manifolds? It turns out that thinking about this question leads to a way of visualizing 3-manifolds without having to visualize 4 or 5-dimensional Euclidean spaces, and to a classification of closed orientable 3-manifolds.