Tuesday, October 2, 2018 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm
Cockins Hall 240
Title: Large-scale Hyperbolic Geometry
Speaker: Ruth Charney (Brandeis University)
Abstract: The cornerstone of the bridge from geometry to group theory was laid by Max Dehn in the early 20th century in his work on hyperbolic manifolds. In the late 1980’s, Mikhail Gromov introduced a notion of “large-scale” hyperbolicity, vastly generalizing Dehn’s ideas, and in the process launched the field of Geometric Group Theory. I will talk about some key properties of Gromov hyperbolic spaces, their boundaries, and the algebraic and dynamical implications for the groups that act on them.