Title: The Cubical Route to Understanding Groups: General Overview
Speaker: Daniel Wise (McGill University)
Abstract: Cube complexes have come to play an increasingly central role within geometric group theory, as their connection to right-angled Artin groups provides a powerful combinatorial bridge between geometry and algebra. These talks will aim to introduce nonpositively curved cube complexes, and then describe some of the developments that have recently culminated in the resolution of the virtual Haken conjecture for 3-manifolds, and simultaneously dramatically extended our understanding of many infinite groups.
The first talk will give a general overview. The second talk will focus on the dual cube complex construction and survey some of its known applications. The third talk will focus on virtually special cube complexes.
There is a tea scheduled at 3:30 - 4:30 in MW 724 prior to the lecture.
A printable flier for this event can be downloaded here: 
Zassenhaus_Poster_2015 [pdf]
