Current Year:
2019-20

Previous Years:
2018-19
2017-18
2016-17
2015-16
2014-15
2013-14
2012-13

Berkeley Topology Seminar
Fall 2017 - Spring 2018

Location and time
Introductory talk: Wednesdays 2:10pm - 3:00pm in 740 Evans
Research talk: Wednesdays 4:10pm - 5:00pm in 3 Evans
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Organizers
James Conway
Carolyn Abbott

Titles and abstracts

Fall 2017

Date Speaker Title (click for abstract)
Aug 30 Carolyn Abbott (UC Berkeley) (2pm-3pm) Acylindrically hyperbolic groups
(4pm-5pm) Universal acylindrical actions
Sep 6 Bruno Benedetti (U Miami) (2pm-3pm) Background for research talk
(4pm-5pm) Local constructions of triangulated manifolds
Sep 13 Faramarz Vafaee (Caltech) (2pm-3pm) Dehn surgery, lattice theory, and Heegaard Floer homology
(4pm-5pm) The prism manifold realization problem
Sep 20 Misha Kapovich (UC Davis) (2pm-3pm) Background for research talk
(4pm-5pm) Discrete isometry groups of higher rank symmetric spaces
Sep 27 Zhengyi Zhou (UC Berkeley) (2pm-3pm) Morse-Bott cohomology of flow categories
(4pm-5pm) Morse-Bott cohomology from homological perturbation
Oct 4 Jeremy Kahn (Brown) (2pm-3pm) Hyperbolic three-manifolds and surface subgroups
(4pm-5pm) Nearly geodesic surfaces in cusped hyperbolic manifolds
Oct 11 Alexandru Suciu (Northeastern) (2pm-3pm) A quick introduction to cohomology jump loci
(4pm-5pm) Algebraic models, cohomology jump loci, and finiteness properties
Oct 18 Jeffrey Meier (UGA) (2pm-3pm) Trisections and four-dimensional topology
(4pm-5pm) Bridge trisections, complex curves, and exotic four-manifolds
Oct 25 Antoine Song (Princeton) (2pm-3pm) Heegaard splittings and min-max theory
(4pm-5pm) Local min-max surfaces and existence of minimal Heegaard splittings
Nov 1 Mladen Bestvina (Utah) (2pm-3pm) Background for research talk
(4pm-5pm) Boundary amenability of Out(F_n)
Nov 8 Oleg Lazarev (Columbia) (2pm-3pm) Introduction to Weinstein manifolds
(4pm-5pm) Simplifying Weinstein Morse functions
Nov 15 Bahar Acu (Northwestern) (2pm-3pm) Introduction to open book decompositions and Lefschetz fibrations
(4pm-5pm) The Weinstein conjecture for iterated planar contact structures
Nov 29 Eric Samperton (UC Davis) (2pm-3pm) Computational complexity in geometric topology
(4pm-5pm) Coloring invariants of knots are often intractable
Dec 6 Raphael Zentner (Regensburg) (2pm-3pm) Connections, curvature, holonomy, and instantons
(4pm-5pm) Irreducible SL(2,C)-representations of integer homology 3-spheres

Spring 2018

*The February 7 meeting will not meet at 4-5, and the research talk will be at 2-3.*
*On April 4, the first meeting will be at 2:45-3:45, starting at the listed time, and not 10 minutes later.*
*The April 20 meeting is on Friday, and the 4-5 talk will be in 732 Evans.*
Date Speaker Title (click for abstract)
Jan 17 Ruth Charney (Brandeis) (2pm-3pm) Quasi-isometries: What are they and why do we care?
(4pm-5pm) Boundaries of groups
Jan 24 Michael Landry (Yale) (2pm-3pm) An introduction to fibered 3-manifolds and the Thurston norm
(4pm-5pm) Taut branched surfaces which span fibered faces
Jan 31 Richard Bamler (UC Berkeley) (2pm-3pm) Ricci flow with surgery and the classification of 3-manifolds
(4pm-5pm) Classification of diffeomorphism groups of 3-manifolds through Ricci flow
Feb 7 Kei Irie (Kyoto University) (2pm-3pm) Denseness of minimal hypersurfaces for C∞-generic metrics
Feb 14 Derrick Wigglesworth (Utah) (2pm-3pm) Train tracks for free group automorphisms
(4pm-5pm) Distortion for abelian subgroups of Out(Fn)
Feb 21 Priyam Patel (UCSB) (2pm-3pm) Algebraic and topological properties of big mapping class groups
(4pm-5pm) Homomorphisms of pure mapping class groups to the integers
Feb 28 Ken Bromberg (Utah) (2pm-3pm) Univalent functions, surfaces in hyperbolic space and Schwarzian derivatives
(4pm-5pm) Bounds on renormalized volume and the volume of the convex core
Mar 7 Laura Starkston (Stanford) (2pm-3pm) Background for research talk
(4pm-5pm) Smooth and singular symplectic surfaces
Mar 14 Beatrice Pozzetti (University of Heidelberg) (2pm-3pm) Rigidity and flexibility for discrete subgroups of semisimple Lie groups
(4pm-5pm) Maximal Representations
Mar 21 Ciprian Manolescu (UCLA) (2pm-3pm) Intersection homology and perverse sheaves
(4pm-5pm) A sheaf-theoretic model for SL(2,ℂ) Floer homology
Mar 28 No seminar Spring Break
Apr 4 Søren Galatius (Stanford/Copenhagen) (2:45pm-3:45pm) Background for research talk
(4pm-5pm) Cohomology of mapping class groups near their virtual cohomological dimension
Apr 11 Shea Vela-Vick (LSU) (2pm-3pm) Contact structures in Heegaard Floer theory
(4pm-5pm) Knot Floer homology and fibered knots
Apr 20 (Friday) Henry Segerman (Oklahoma State) (2pm-3pm) A survey of veering triangulations
(4pm-5pm) From veering triangulations to pseudo-Anosov flows
Apr 25 Wolfgang Schmaltz (UC Berkeley) (2pm-3pm) The Polyfold Gromov-Witten Invariants
(4pm-5pm) Gromov-Witten Axioms for Symplectic Manifolds via Polyfold Theory