2007-11-30

Jean-Claude Hausmann, University of Geneva (Switzerland)

Polygon spaces and their cohomology rings

Polygon spaces in R^d occur in connection with statistical shape theory and robotic. For d=3, they also became a chapter of Hamiltonian geometry, as a good source of examples. Closely related to toric manifolds, they happen to be classifiable by their mod 2 cohomology ring (the same problem with planar polygon spaces (K. Walker's conjecture) is still open). This talk will be a survey of these topics, based on joint works with A. Knutson, E. Rodriguez and, more recently, with M. Farber and D. Schuetz.