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Caltech

Geometry and Topology Seminar

Friday, May 13, 2016
3:00pm to 5:00pm
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How not to prove the smooth 4-dimensional Poincare conjecture
David Gay, Associate Professor, Mathematics, University of Georgia,

In honor of John Stallings' great paper, "How not to prove the Poincare conjecture", I will show how to reduce the smooth 4-dimensional Poincare conjecture to a (presumably incredibly difficult) statement in group theory. This is joint work with Aaron Abrams and Rob Kirby. We use trisections where Stallings used Heegaard splittings. The bigger picture is that we set up a bijection between closed, connected, oriented, smooth 4-manifolds and a certain class of purely algebraic structures which we call "group trisections", modulo a purely algebraic stabilization operation. So in the end smooth 4-dimensional topology is "just group theory"! 

For more information, please contact Mathematics Department by email at [email protected] or visit http://www.math.caltech.edu/~gt/.