Topology seminar - Nancy Scherich

Event Date: 

Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm

Event Location: 

  • South Hall 4607B

Nancy Scherich (UCSB)

Title: Mapping the Braid Groups into Lattices

Abstract: Many well loved representations of the braid groups have the property that the image matrices fix a Hermitian form. Using this form, one can show that specializing to certain Salem numbers places the image inside a lattice. While it is unknown whether the image itself is a lattice, there are some interesting results on commensurability of the target lattices.