Character formulas and cohomology theories

Seminar: 
Geometry, Symmetry and Physics
Event time: 
Monday, October 16, 2017 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Speaker: 
Nora Ganter
Speaker affiliation: 
University of Melbourne
Event description: 

This talk aims to give an introduction tothe field of homotopical representation theory at the example of the Weyl and Kac character formulas. These occur as the result of the identical compact manifold argument, in one case using K-theory, in the other elliptic cohomology. This suggests that all the infinite dimensional aspectsof the usual loop group picture are somehow absorbed by elliptic cohomology.