TETRAHEDRAL GEOMETRY/TOPOLOGY SEMINAR

         ANNOUNCEMENT

DATE:              Friday, March 2, 2007                  

LOCATION:    Hempfield High School, Room 213 (directions at http://www.millersville.edu/~tgts/)                

                           followed by dinner at Barbara’s home.

4:30 TALK:      Barbara Nimersheim, Franklin and Marshall College

                           “A Hyperbolic Geometer Does Number Theory (or is it ‘attempts to do’?)”

Amazingly enough, number theorists' Markoffspectrum (defined using binary quadratic forms) has implications for closed geodesics on the punctured torus-a beautiful hyperbolic 2-manifold.  I will summarize results from three papers:  one by Carolyn Series characterizing simple geodesics on the punctured torus, one by David Crisp and William Moran about geodesics with single self-intersections, and one by David Crisp, et al. on doubly self-intersecting geodesics.  While the connections between number theory and hyperbolic geometry are interesting in their own right, I will conclude by explaining why I'm particularly interested in them and how I hope these results will relate to hyperbolic 3-manifolds.

     EVERYONE WELCOME

       PLEASE FORWARD THIS ANNOUNCEMENT TO ANYONE INTERESTED

           The Tetrahedral Geometry/Topology Seminar is sponsored jointly by

Elizabethtown College, Franklin & Marshall College, Lebanon Valley College and Millersville University.