Matthew Beckett, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo
“Bundles and Connections”
Differential Geometry is the study of smooth manifolds, often with some added structure. A common area of study is vector bundles with connections. This talk will try to provide some of the intuition behind these objects, while in the second half I will try to give a brief introduction to the study of instantons and, time permitting, their application to differential topology.