Discrete Geometry & Combinatorics Seminar: Jon McCammond

Event Date: 

Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - 2:00pm

Event Location: 

  • 4607B South Hall
Speaker: Jon McCammond
 
Title: The Mysterious Geometry of Artin Groups: Part I
 
Coxeter groups are a large family of groups whose definition
is motivated by the spherical and euclidean reflection groups that
encode the symmetries of the regular polytopes and the euclidean
tilings at the heart of Lie theory, respectively.
 
Artin groups are another large family of groups whose definition is a
geometrically motivated variation on the definition of Coxeter groups.
The relationship between the two families is essentially the same as
the relationship between the symmetric group and the braid group.
 
In this short series of talks, I will introduce the geometric spaces
associated to Artin groups and describe what we know about them.  The
first talk is a quick overview of some key aspects of the theory of
Coxeter groups leading to an explicit description of the spaces that
are used to define Artin groups.