Using logic to study homeomorphism groups

Seminar: 
Colloquium
Event time: 
Wednesday, December 6, 2023 - 4:00pm
Location: 
KT 219
Speaker: 
Thomas Koberda
Speaker affiliation: 
University of Virginia
Event description: 
I will describe some recent results on the first order rigidity of homeomorphism groups of compact manifolds, and their applications to dynamics of group actions on manifolds. I will also describe how to find “syntactic” invariants of manifolds, and how these can be used to give a conjectural model-theoretic characterization of the genus of a surface.