Department of Mathematics and Statistics




Scottish Topology Seminars

Summer 1997

Friday, 18th April, 2.30PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower
N.Habegger (Nantes)
Kontsevich's integral and Milnor's invariants

Friday, 25th April, 2.30PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower
S.Willerton (Edinburgh)
De Rham homotopy theory and the Vassiliev invariants of pure braids

Friday, 16th May, 2.30PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower
R.Wood (Manchester)
The hit problem for differential operators acting on polynomials

Monday, 19th May, 2PM, Room 4312, JCMB
W.Browder (Princeton & Arhus)
Lie algebra groups and their cohomology
(Visit supported by LMS)

Thursday, 29th May, 4PM, Room 4312, JCMB
S.Jackowski (Warsaw)
Homotopy decompositions of classifying spaces of discrete groups associated to $G$-posets.
(Joint with Geometry Seminar)

Friday, 13th June, 2.30PM, Room 4312, JCMB
B.Steer (Oxford)
Floer homology in knot theory

Friday, 13th June, 4PM, Lecture Room C, JCMB
J.P.May (Chicago)
Operads in algebra, topology and physics
(LMS Hardy Lecture tour)

Monday, 23rd June, 4PM, Room 5215, JCMB
S.P.Novikov (Maryland & Moscow)
Low-dimensional topology and conductivity in normal metals
(Visit supported by LMS)

Tuesday, 8th July, ICMS
LMS Spitalfields Geometry Day
A one-day meeting to celebrate the award by Edinburgh University of an honorary degree to Dusa McDuff.
Speakers: S.Donaldson, P.Gauduchon, N.Hitchin, D.McDuff.

Friday, 19 September, 4PM, Room 4312, JCMB
P.Akhmetev (Moscow)
Cobordism groups of critical points of multiparameter families of functions.
A topological interpretation of the Milnor functor K_2(Z).

Spring 1997

Friday, 17th January, 2.30PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower

M.Lackenby (Cambridge)
Unknotting operations
Kneading 8_6 The knot 8_6 was designed after this talk by Simon Willerton and baked by Ida Thompson.
The unknotting operation was performed by all present, by eating the knot. Simon also designed the St.Andrew's torus pictured above.

Friday, 24th January, 2.30PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower

J.Morava (John Hopkins)
Towards the stable cohomology of Riemann moduli space

Friday, 31st January, 2.30PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower

C.B.Thomas (Cambridge)
Almost linear free actions by finite groups on S^{2n-1}

Monday, 10 February, 3.30PM, Room 5215, JCMB (Edinburgh Maths. & Stats. Dept. Colloquium)

D.Epstein (Warwick)
Solving the Word Problem for Groups by Using Rewriting Systems

Friday, 14th February, 2.30PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower

R.Oliver (Paris)
Equivariant K-theory of proper actions of infinite discrete groups

Friday, 21st February, 2.30PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower

E.Bayer-Fluckiger (Besancon)
Lattices having automorphisms with given characteristic polynomial
(Visit supported by LMS)

Friday, 28th February, 2.30PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower

F.Quinn (Virginia Tech)
Machine computation of topological field theories on 2-complexes
(Visit supported by LMS)
Abstract Paper

Autumn 1996

Friday, 18th October, 2.30PM, Room 7, Appleton Tower

J.Roberts (Edinburgh)
Moduli spaces of flow-graphs and 3-manifold invariants

Friday, 1st November, 2.30PM, Room 7, Appleton Tower

W.Sutherland (Oxford & Aberdeen)
Vector products and groups of bundle automorphisms
Informal abstract

Friday, 8th November, 2.30PM, Room 7, Appleton Tower

L.Lambe (Rutgers)
On transferring algebra structures under homotopy equivalences

Friday, 22nd November, 2.30PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower

S.Prassidis (Vanderbilt & Edinburgh)
Rigidity of Coxeter groups

Wednesday, 27th November, 4PM, Room 4312, JCMB

A.Bak (Bielefeld)
Global actions: a purely algebraic setting for homotopy theory, including an algebraic definition of the higher K-groups

Friday, 29th November, 2.30PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower

R.Hill (University College, London)
The Quadratic Reciprocity Law
Friday, 29th November, 4.15PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower
S.Velani (Imperial College, London)
Hausdorff dimension, Kleinian groups and Diophantine approximation

Friday, 6th December, 2.30PM, Room 2D, Appleton Tower

J.Klein (Bielefeld)
On the existence and classification of embeddings

Scottish Topology 1995-1996
Andrew Ranicki e-mail a.ranicki@edinburgh.ac.uk
British Topology Home Page