TETRAHEDRAL GEOMETRY/TOPOLOGY SEMINAR
ANNOUNCEMENT
DATE: Friday, February
1, 2008
LOCATION: Hempfield
High School, Room 213 (directions at
http://www.millersville.edu/~tgts/)
followed by dinner
at a place to be determined.
4:30 TALK: Michael
McCooey,
Title: Symmetry
groups of non-simply-connected four-manifolds
Abstract: I'll discuss a research project that
I finished last summer, whose main result
was the following:
Let M be a closed four-manifold whose first homology group is
nontrivial and free abelian. If the Euler characteristic is nonzero and the
second Betti
number is non-two, then
the only groups which can admit homologically trivial, locally
linear actions on M are
cyclic. Loosely speaking, this result (and some of my earlier work)
helps make precise the
intuitively plausible notion that "most" four-manifolds have small
symmetry groups. The main
tool is Borel equivariant cohomology, a functor which
combines
information about a space
and a group acting on it using group cohomology. I
will provide
background and context that
I hope will be appropriate to the usual audience.
EVERYONE WELCOME
PLEASE
FORWARD THIS ANNOUNCEMENT TO ANYONE INTERESTED
The Tetrahedral Geometry/Topology Seminar is sponsored jointly by