Noetherian Ring Seminar Spring 2013

Thursday - 4pm
Refreshments served at 3:30 pm in the Tea Room #4161
McHenry Building - Room 4130
For more information, contact Liz Pannell

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May 9, 2013

Intersecting loops on surfaces, string topology, and the moduli
space of Riemann surfaces

Kate Poirier, Post-Doc at UC Berkeley

String topology is the study of algebraic structures arising
from intersecting loops in manifolds. These structures encode
interesting topological and geometric information about the manifold
itself. One example of a string topology operation is the Goldman
bracket, which is given by intersecting loops on surfaces. In this
talk, I will define the Goldman bracket for surfaces, introduce
generalizations of it to string topology operations for manifolds of
higher dimension, and describe how a compactification of the moduli
space of Riemann surfaces parametrizes these operations. This includes
joint work with Gabriel C. Drummond-Cole and Nathaniel Rounds.