CORNELL

TOPOLOGY

FESTIVAL*

May 1-4, 2003

Thanks to all participants for making the 41st Annual Cornell Topology Festival a success.

• For notes from the panel discussion, click here.
• Several photos of the festival are now posted.
• To see who won the Acme Klein bottle** for a preprint, click here.

The speakers were:

• DROR BAR-NATAN (Hebrew University and University of Toronto)
  THE  UNREASONABLE  AFFINITY  OF  KNOT  THEORY  AND  THE  ALGEBRAIC  SCIENCES

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• JOAN BIRMAN (Barnard College, Columbia University)
  STABILIZATION  IN  THE  BRAID  GROUPS

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• FRED COHEN (University of Rochester)
  BRAID  GROUPS,  THE  TOPOLOGY  OF  CONFIGURATION  SPACES,  AND  HOMOTOPY  GROUPS

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• BENSON FARB (University of Chicago)
  HIDDEN  SYMMETRIES  OF  RIEMANNIAN  MANIFOLDS

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• GILBERT LEVITT (Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse)
  AUTOMORPHISMS  OF  CANONICAL  SPLITTINGS

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• JOHN MEIER (Lafayette College)
  ASYMPTOTIC  COHOMOLOGY  FOR  THE  MOTION  GROUP  OF  A  TRIVIAL  n-COMPONENT  LINK

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• JUSTIN ROBERTS (UC San Diego)
  ROZANSKY-WITTEN  THEORY

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• DYLAN THURSTON (Harvard University)
  HOW  EFFICIENTLY  DO  3-MANIFOLDS  BOUND  4-MANIFOLDS?

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• ULRIKE TILLMANN (University of Oxford)
  THE  TOPOLOGY  OF  THE  SPACE  OF  STRINGS

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• ALAIN VALETTE (Université de Neuchâtel)
  VANISHING  RESULTS  FOR  THE  FIRST  L² BETTI  NUMBER  OF  A  GROUP

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• KAREN VOGTMANN (Cornell University)
  GRAPH  HOMOLOGY  AND  OUTER  SPACE

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• Click here for abstracts of the talks.

*This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0244361. Any opinions, findings, and conclustions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the organizers or authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

**A Klein bottle donated by Acme Klein bottles was awarded to a randomly selected contributor to the preprint table.