Mathematics Colloquium

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Symmetries of Aspherical Manifolds

Speaker: Shmuel Weinberger, University of Chicago

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Monday, September 13, 2010, 3:45 p.m.

Synopsis:

Aspherical manifolds are manifolds whose universal covers are contractible. They play special roles in geometry and topology: for instance they are conjectured to be rigidly determined by their fundamental groups, and their geometrical properties are expected to be predictable from algebraic properties of their fundamental groups.

In this talk, I will try to explain some old conjectures about these and their fates in their intervening decades.