Cornell Math - MATH 752, Spring 1999

MATH 752 — Spring 1999
Berstein Seminar in Topology

Instructor: Karen Vogtmann

Time:  MWF 11:15-12:05

Room: WE B25

The aim of this seminar is to introduce students to specific topics in topology which are not routinely covered in other courses, and which should be accessible to anyone who has completed the usual first-year sequence of graduate courses, including Math 551. My own bias is toward topics which involve the connections between topology, geometry and group theory, including groups acting on trees, the Nielsen-Thurston theory of surfaces and mapping class groups, hyperbolic and CAT(0) spaces and groups, isoperimetric inequalities in groups, and automatic structures on groups. This semester I would like to structure the course around specific unsolved problems in geometric group theory. We will choose problems, from any one of several widely available problem lists, learn the background necessary to understand the problem, report on existing papers which give partial results, and discuss possible approaches to solving the problems. The course will be run as a seminar, in which students present the material informally to the rest of the class.