2:00 pm Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Junior Topology: An introduction to Heegaard splittings and Heegaard-Floer homology by Laura Starkston & Nick Zufelt (University of Texas at Austin) in RLM 12.166
A classical and powerful fact about 3-manifolds is that every compact orientable 3-manifold can be expressed as the union of two genus-g handlebodies, for some g, which are glued via a diffeomorphism of their boundary, i.e., a genus-g surface. This surface, together with the information about the gluing map, constitute a Heegaard diagram for the 3-manifold. A Heegaard diagram for a 3-manifold contains a lot of useful information about the 3-manifold. In this talk, we'll give an overview of the basics of Heegaard splittings before discussing how they play a crucial role in Heegaard-Floer homology theory, a theory that has dominated 3-manifold topology for the last decade. This talk will be accessible to everyone, and is meant to serve, in part, as an introduction to the Heegaard-Floer learning seminar that meets each Friday at 2:30. Submitted by
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