Geometry & Topology seminar
Jesse Gell-Redman, University of Toronto
“Index formulas on singular spaces”
Riemannian stratified spaces arise in many contexts, notably as the compactifications of moduli spaces, and on the K ̈ahler-Einstein manifolds studied recently by Donaldson, Tian, and many other. We discuss various extensions of index formulas (such as the Chern-Gauss-Bonnet formula) to these spaces, work which was initiated by Cheeger on manifolds with conical singularities in the 70s. The main object of study are naturally arising elliptic operators (e.g.