Contact

Hoel Queffelec
hoel.queffelec(-at-)umontpellier.fr




This seminar is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101064705.
   

What is it about?

This learning seminar will be hosted monthly, with two one-and-a-half hour talks. The thematics will be broadly related to braids, diagrams, and algebraic, geometric and topological methods used to understand them. The goal is to give talks accessible to everyone.

June 20th, 2023

Location

MSI, Board room 2.48

Program

  • 9:00am   Jack Brand (ANU)
    Overtwisted disks in contact 3-manifolds using Morse diagrams
    One of the most important questions to ask about a contact structure is whether it is overtwisted or tight. In 1989, Eliashberg proved his famous result that the classification of overtwisted contact structures is equivalent to the classification of homotopy classes of 2-plane fields, and therefore it is the tight contact structures that are geometrically more interesting. More recently, efforts have been made (originally by Goodman, Honda-Kazez-Matic) to detect whether a contact structure compatible with an open book decomposition is overtwisted or tight by studying the monodromy of the open book decomposition. In this talk, we provide a new criterion for the overtwistedness of a contact structure using the Morse diagrams compatible with an open book decomposition.
  • 10:30am   Morning tea
  • 11:00am   Anand Deopurkar (ANU)
    TBA
    TBA


May 8th and 9th

See the workshop page.


March 28th, 2023

Location

MSI, Board room 2.48

Program

  • 9:30am   Anthony Henderson (Defence Science and Technology Group and The University of Sydney (Honorary Professor))
    Artin groups of reflection subgroups
    Let W be a Coxeter group with Coxeter generating set S and corresponding Artin group B. Any subgroup W' of W generated by reflections (conjugates of elements of S) has its own Coxeter generating set S' induced by S, so it has its own Artin group B'. The relationship between B' and B is straightforward in the case when S' is a subset of S, less so in general. After illustrating the issues, I will explain how known results on the normalizer of W' in W can be lifted to the level of Artin groups. This is joint work with Thomas Gobet and Ivan Marin.
  • 11:00am   Morning tea
  • 11:30am   Anthony Licata
    Metrics on triangulated categories (definitions and questions)
    I'll give some basic definitions and examples of metrics on triangulated categories, and try to pose some (probably fairly obvious) questions that the definitions suggest. Some of you have probably seen Amnon talk about metrics in the last year or two. This talk will be more elementary than those talks, and the talk will almost definitely have no new theorems. But I'll try to emphasize the relevance of some ideas from geometric group theory in homological algebra, with an eye towards future work.


February 28th, 2023

Location

MSI, Board room 2.48

Program

  • 9am   Ian Le: Braid varietes
  • 10:30am   Morning tea
  • 11am   Hoel Queffelec: Ordering braids and other groups