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Contractibility as uniqueness

Colloquium
October 20, 2022
4:15PM - 5:15PM
CH 312

Date Range
Add to Calendar 2022-10-20 16:15:00 2022-10-20 17:15:00 Contractibility as uniqueness Title:  Contractibility as uniqueness Speaker:  Emily Riehl (Johns Hopkins University) Speaker's URL:  https://emilyriehl.github.io/ Abstract:  What does it mean for something to exist uniquely? Classically, to say that a set A has a unique element means that there is an element x of A and any other element y of A equals x. When this assertion is applied to a space A, instead of a mere set, and interpreted in a continuous fashion, it encodes the statement that the space is contractible, i.e., that A is continuously deformable to a point. This talk will explore this notion of contractibility as uniqueness and its role in generalizing from ordinary categories to infinite-dimensional categories. CH 312 Department of Mathematics math@osu.edu America/New_York public

Title:  Contractibility as uniqueness

Speaker:  Emily Riehl (Johns Hopkins University)

Speaker's URL:  https://emilyriehl.github.io/

Abstract:  What does it mean for something to exist uniquely? Classically, to say that a set A has a unique element means that there is an element x of A and any other element y of A equals x. When this assertion is applied to a space A, instead of a mere set, and interpreted in a continuous fashion, it encodes the statement that the space is contractible, i.e., that A is continuously deformable to a point. This talk will explore this notion of contractibility as uniqueness and its role in generalizing from ordinary categories to infinite-dimensional categories.

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