Date: 5 April 2019 Location: Hempfield High School, Room 213 Speaker: Ping Xu, Pennsylvania State University Title: Symplectic realizations of Poisson manifolds Abstract: Poisson brackets were originally invented in the early 19th century to provide a framework for optics and classical mechanics. Poisson geometry developed into a separate branch of mathematics during the 1960s, with applications involving various aspects of physics, as well as other areas of mathematics such as representation theory and integrable systems. In this talk, I will give a brief introduction of Poisson manifolds, and discuss symplectic realizations of Poisson manifolds, a longstanding problem which can be traced back to Sophus Lie.