Get ready for another thrilling Table Football Tournament after last year’s smash success. Whether you’re a seasoned player or just up for some fun, this is your chance to claim the title of best team in the department.
What to expect:
• 2-player teams will face off in a group stage, followed by knockout rounds.
• The exact format will adapt depending on how many teams sign up – so rally your friends and get involved
How to enter:
A trace on a group is a positive-definite conjugation-invariant function on it. These traces correspond to tracial states on the group's maximal C*-algebra. In the past couple of decades, the study of traces has led to exciting connections to the rigidity, stability, and dynamics of groups. In this talk, I will explain these connections and focus on the topological structure of the space of traces of some groups. We will see the different behaviours of these spaces for free groups vs. higher-rank lattices, and how our strategy for the free group can be used to answer a question of Musat and Rørdam regarding free products of matrix algebras. This is based on joint works with Arie Levit, Joav Orovitz, and Itamar Vigdorovich.