The conformal dimension of a hyperbolic group is a powerful numeric quasi-isometry invariant associated to its boundary.

As an invariant it is finer than the topological dimension and allows us to distinguish between groups with homeomorphic boundaries.

I will start by talking about what conformal geometry even is, before discussing how this connects to studying the boundaries of hyperbolic groups.

I will probably end by saying how jolly hard it is to compute.

In this talk I will introduce the study of lattices in locally compact groups through their actions CAT(0) spaces. This is an extremely rich class of groups including S-arithmetic groups acting on products of symmetric spaces and buildings, right angled Artin and Coxeter groups acting on polyhedral complexes, Burger-Mozes simple groups acting on products of trees, and the recent CAT(0) but non biautomatic groups of Leary and Minasyan. If time permits I will discuss some of my recent work related to the Leary-Minasyan groups.

The graph complex is a remarkable object with very rich structure and many, sometimes mysterious, connections to topology. To illustrate one such connection, I will attempt to construct a “self-linking” invariant of knots and expand on the ideas behind it.

Riche—Williamson recently proved that the characters of tilting modules for GL_h are given by non-singular p-Kazhdan—Lusztig polynomials providing p>h.  This is equivalent to calculating the decomposition numbers for symmetric groups labelled by partitions with at most h columns.  We discuss how this result can be generalised to all cyclotomic quiver Hecke algebras via a new and explicit isomorphism between (truncations of) quiver Hecke algebras and Elias–Williamson’s diagrammatic endomorphism algebras of Bott–Samelson bimodules. 

This allows us to give an elementary and explicit proof of the main theorem of Riche–Williamson’s recent monograph and extend their categorical equivalence to all cyclotomic quiver Hecke algebras, thus solving Libedinsky–Plaza’s categorical blob conjecture.  Furthermore, it allows us to classify and construct the homogeneous simple modules of quiver Hecke algebras via BGG resolutions.   
 
This is joint work with A. Cox, A. Hazi, D.Michailidis, E. Norton, and J. Simental.  
 

I will describe joint work with Abouzaid which constructs a stable homotopy theory refinement of Floer homology that has coefficients in the Morava K-theory spectra. The classifying spaces of finite groups satisfy Poincare duality for the Morava K-theories, which allows us to use this version of Floer homology to produce virtual fundamental chains for moduli spaces of Floer trajectories. As an application, we prove the Arnold conjecture for ordinary cohomology with coefficients in finite fields.

A celebrated result in geometry is the Kobayashi-Hitchin correspondence, which states that a holomorphic vector bundle on a compact Kähler manifold admits a Hermite-Einstein metric if and only if the bundle is slope polystable. Recently, Dervan and Sektnan have conjectured an analogue of this correspondence for fibrations whose fibres are compact Kähler manifolds admitting Kähler metrics of constant scalar curvature. Their conjecture is that such a fibration is polystable in a suitable sense, if and only if it admits an optimal symplectic connection. In this talk, I will provide an introduction to this theory, and describe my recent work on the conjecture. Namely, I show that existence of an optimal symplectic connection implies polystability with respect to a large class of fibration degenerations. The techniques used involve analysing geodesics in the space of relatively Kähler metrics of fibrewise constant scalar curvature, and convexity of the log-norm functional in this setting. This is work for my PhD thesis, supervised by Frances Kirwan and Ruadhaí Dervan.

(joint with Indranil Biswas, Jacques Hurtubise, Sean Lawton, arXiv:2104.05589)

Let $G$ be either a compact Lie group or a reductive Lie group. Let $\pi$ be the fundamental group of a 2-manifold (possibly with boundary).
We can define a character variety by ${\rm Hom}(\pi, G)/G$, where $G$ acts by conjugation.

We explore the mappings between character varieties that are induced  by mappings between surfaces. It is shown that these mappings are generally Poisson.

In some cases, we explicitly calculate the Poisson bi-vector.

We give a brief introduction to Floer homotopy, from the Seiberg-Witten point of view.  We will then discuss Manolescu's version of finite-dimensional approximation for rational homology spheres.  We prove that a version of finite-dimensional approximation for the Seiberg-Witten equations associates equivariant spectra to a large class of three-manifolds.  In the process we will also associate, to a cobordism of three-manifolds, a map between spectra.  We give some applications to intersection forms of four-manifolds with boundary. This is joint work with Hirofumi Sasahira. 

I will briefly introduce the Chabauty-Kim argument for effective finiteness results on "topologically rich enough" curves. I will then introduce the Fontaine-Mazur conjecture and show how it provides an effective proof of Faltings' Theorem.

In the case of non-CM elliptic curves minus a point, following work of Federico Amadio Guidi, I'll show how the relevant input for effective finiteness is provided by the vanishing of adjoint Selmer groups proven by Newton and Thorne.