University of Georgia/MPIM Bonn

The smooth mapping class group of the 4-sphere is pi_0 of the space of orientation preserving self-diffeomorphisms of S^4. At the moment we have no idea whether this group is trivial or not. Watanabe has shown that higher homotopy groups can be nontrivial. Inspired by Watanabe's constructions, we'll look for interesting self-diffeomorphisms of S^4. Most of the talk will be an outline for a program to find a nice geometric generating set for this mapping class group; a few small steps in the program are actually theorems. The point of finding generators is that if they are explicit enough then you have a hope of either showing that they are all trivial or finding an invariant that is well adapted to obstructing triviality of these generators.