Convex cocompact subgroups of the Goeritz group

Seminar: 
Geometry & Topology
Event time: 
Tuesday, September 13, 2022 - 4:15pm
Location: 
LOM 214
Speaker: 
Bena Tshishiku
Speaker affiliation: 
Brown University
Event description: 

This talk is about hyperbolicity of surface group extensions and a question of Farb-Mosher about whether purely pseudo-Anosov subgroups of mapping class groups are convex cocompact. We’ll explain this problem and give an answer for subgroups of the genus-2 Goeritz group, which is the group of mapping classes of a genus-2 surface that extend to the genus-2 Heegaard splitting of the 3-sphere. In addition we give a refined version of the Nielsen-Thurston classification for the Goeritz group.