Date: 4 October 2013, 4:30pm
Location: Hempfield High School, Room 213
 Speaker: Herman Gluck, University of Pennsylvania
   Title: Lipschitz Minimality of Group Multiplication on the Three-Sphere

Abstract.  

The most beautiful maps between beautiful spaces ought to be optimal in
some specific mathematical sense, and then characterized by that
optimality.  Haomin Wen, a graduate student at Penn, has recently proved
that the group multiplication map m: S3 × S3 -> S3 is a Lipschitz
constant minimizer in its homotopy class, uniquely so up to composition
with isometries of domain and range.  I will explain the background to
Haomin's result, and then give a taste of his ideas.