Tuesday Seminar on Topology

Seminar information archive ～04/19｜Next seminar｜Future seminars 04/20～

Date, time & place Tuesday 17:00 - 18:30 056Room #056 (Graduate School of Math. Sci. Bldg.)
Organizer(s) KAWAZUMI Nariya, KITAYAMA Takahiro, SAKASAI Takuya

2009/11/24

16:30-18:00   Room #056 (Graduate School of Math. Sci. Bldg.)
Adam Clay (University of British Columbia)
A topological approach to left orderable groups
[ Abstract ]
A group G is said to be left orderable if there is a strict
total ordering of its elements such that gin G. Left orderable groups have been useful in solving many problems in topology, and now we find that topology is returning the favour: the set of all left orderings of a group is denoted by LO(G), and it admits a natural topology, under which LO(G) becomes a compact topological
space. In general, the structure of the space LO(G) is not well understood, although there are surprising results in a few special cases.
For example, the space of left orderings of the braid group B_n for n>2
contains isolated points (yet it is uncountable), while the space of left
orderings of the fundamental group of the Klein bottle is finite.

Twice in recent years, the space of left orderings has been used very
successfully to solve difficult open problems from the field of left
orderable groups, even though the connection between the topology of LO(G) and the algebraic properties of G was still unclear. I will explain the
newest understanding of this connection, and highlight some potential
applications of further advances.