Graduate Student / Postdoc Seminar

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Odometers, Cutting and Stacking, Graphs, and Flat Surfaces: a Magic Trick

Speaker: Rodrigo Treviño

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Friday, December 11, 2015, 1 p.m.

Synopsis:

In this talk I'll illustrate how to talk about flat surfaces using a special types of graphs, called a Bratteli diagrams, and a technique called "cutting and stacking". To illustrate this dictionary between surfaces and Bratteli diagrams, I'll use the example of an odometer, which is a cute and fun dynamical system. The usefulness (or magic) of this dictionary is that some properties of the surface can be ascertained from properties of the graph, and vice versa. The talk will be informal and, hopefully, very accessible to everyone.