MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2005

GEOMETRY/TOPOLOGY SEMINAR 667
TIME: 12:20 p.m. – 1:20 p.m.
ROOM: 209A Ayres Hall
SPEAKER: Dr. Valeriy Berestovskiy, Visiting Faculty
TITLES: Splitting of fundamental group of orientable Haken manifold related to its JSJ-splitting

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2005

GEOMETRY/TOPOLOGY SEMINAR 667
TIME: 12:20 p.m. – 1:20 p.m.
ROOM: 209A Ayres Hall
SPEAKER: Dr. Valeriy Berestovskiy, Visiting Faculty
TITLE: Smooth manifolds and their tangent bundles


ALGEBRA SEMINAR
TIME: 3:30 p.m.
ROOM: 214 Ayres Hall
SPEAKER: Brian Irick
TITLE: Banach-Tarski Paradox I
ABSTRACT: This famous paradox states that a sphere S2 can be decomposed into finitely many parts (sub-sets)
which can then be re-arranged to get two copies of the starting sphere S2.


ANALYSIS SEMINAR
TIME: 3:35 – 4:25 p.m.
ROOM: 309B Ayres Hall
SPEAKER: Dr. Fedor Andreev, Visiting Faculty
TITLE: Painleve Equations: Introduction and Algebraic Solutions to the Sixth Painleve equation (2)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2005

PROBABILITY SEMINAR
TIME: 1:10 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
ROOM: 209A Ayres Hall
SPEAKER: Dr. Xia Chen
TITLE: Moment inequalities for the local times of multi-parameter processes. (Continued)

JUNIOR COLLOQUIUM
TIME: 3:30p.m.
ROOM: 214 Ayres Hall
SPEAKER: Dr. Jochen Denzler
TITLE: The abyss of the continuum and the predictability of unpredictability
ABSTRACT: It has been said that the continuum (the set of real numbers) is a well-defined collection of mostly undefinable objects. Buried in this vastness is the paradox that a phenomenon can be completely random and completely deterministic at the same time. In seemingly artificial examples, this coexistence is blatantly obvious, rather than paradoxical. However, it became clear in the second half of the 20th century that these artificial examples can faithfully represent a subset of behaviors of simple mechanical systems. On one hand, this observation has indeed torn to shreds the idea of viewing the world like a clockwork, even within the confines of Newtonian mechanics. On the other hand, this genuine scientific progress got camouflaged by unwarranted popular generalizations, marketed in a way that has earned some disrepute. We’ll get some glimpses of the genuine mathematics behind the now fading pop-sci fluff on dynamical systems.

Pizza will be served.


FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2005

TOPOLOGY SEMINAR
TIME: 12:20 p.m. – 1:20 p.m.
ROOM: 209B Ayres Hall
SPEAKER: Dr. Nikolay Brodskiy
TITLE: Coarse Geometry


COLLOQUIUM
TIME: 3:35 – 4:25 p.m.
ROOM: 214 Ayres Hall
SPEAKER: Professor Dusan Repovs, Institute for Mathematics, Physics and Mechanics, University of Ljubljana
TITLE: Topology of wild Cantor sets
ABSTRACT: The first part of the talk will be a historical survey on wild Cantor sets in R3 the first such set being constructed by Louis Antoine already in the 1920’s in his Dissertation, after he was blinded while serving in the French army during WWI. In the main part of the talk we shall present a new general technique for constructing wild Cantor sets in R3 which nevertheless Lipschitz homogeneously embedded into R3. Applying the well-known Kauffman version of the Jones polynomial we shall show that our construction produces even uncountably many topologically inequivalent wild Cantor sets in R3. These Cantor sets have the same number of components in the interior of each stage of the defining sequence and are Lipschitz homogenous. We shall also present construction of rigid wild Cantor sets in R3 with simply connected complement. In conclusion, we plan to state some open problems and conjectures.

REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED IN AYRES HALL ROOM 119 AT 3:00 P.M.