C4

Every topological space is metrisable once the symmetry axiom is abandoned and the codomain of the metric is allowed to take values in a suitable structure tailored to fit the topology (and every completely regular space is similarly metrisable while retaining symmetry). This result was popularised in 1988 by Kopperman, who used value semigroups as the codomain for the metric, and restated in 1997 by Flagg, using value quantales. In categorical terms, each of these constructions extends to an equivalence of categories between the category Top and a category of all L-valued metric spaces (where L ranges over either value semigroups or value quantales) and the classical \epsilon-\delta notion of continuous mappings. Thus, there are (at least) two metric formalisms for topology, raising the questions: 1) is any of the two actually useful for doing topology? and 2) are the two formalisms equally powerful for the purposes of topology? After reviewing Flagg's machinery I will attempt to answer the former affirmatively and the latter negatively. In more detail, the two approaches are equipotent when it comes to point-to-point topological consideration, but only Flagg's formalism captures 'higher order' topological aspects correctly, however at a price; there is no notion of product of value quantales. En route to establishing Flagg's formalism as convenient, it will be shown that both fine and coarse variants of homology and homotopy arise as left and right Kan extensions of genuinely metrically constructed functors, and a topologically relevant notion of tensor product of value quantales, a surrogate for the non-existent products, will be described. 


 

Nash-Williams showed that the collection of locally finite trees under the topological minor relation results in a BQO. Naturally, two interesting questions arise:

1.      What is the number \lambda of topological types of locally finite trees?

2.       What are the possible sizes of an equivalence class of locally finite trees?

 For (1), clearly, \omega_0 \leq \lambda \leq c and Matthiesen refined it to \omega_1 \leq \lambda \leq c. Thus, this question becomes non-trivial in the absence of the Continuum Hypothesis. In this paper we address both questions by showing - entirely within ZFC - that for a large collection of locally finite trees that includes those with countably many rays:

- \lambda = \omega_1, and

- the size of an equivalence class can only be either 1 or c.

I will discuss a wonderful structure theorem for finitely generated group containing a codimension one polycyclic-by-finite subgroup, due to Martin Dunwoody and Eric Swenson. I will explain how the theorem is motivated by the torus theorem for 3-manifolds, and examine some of the consequences of this theorem.

Stable commutator length (scl) is a well established invariant of group elements g  (write scl(g)) and  has both geometric and algebraic meaning.

It is a phenomenon that many classes of non-positively curved groups have a gap in stable commutator length: For every non-trivial element g, scl(g) > C for some C>0. Such gaps may be found in hyperbolic groups, Baumslag-solitair groups, free products, Mapping class groups, etc. 
However, the exact size of this gap usually unknown, which is due to a lack of a good source of “quasimorphisms”.

In this talk I will construct a new source of quasimorphisms which yield optimal gaps and show that for Right-Angled Artin Groups and their subgroups the gap of stable commutator length is exactly 1/2. I will also show this gap for certain amalgamated free products.

 In a recent paper Friedl, Zentner and Livingston asked when a sum of torus knots is concordant to an alternating knot. After a brief analysis of the problem in its full generality, I will describe some effective obstructions based on Floer type theories.

Warped cones are infinite metric spaces that are associated with actions by homeomorphisms on metric spaces. In this talk I will try to explain why the coarse geometry of warped cones can be seen as an invariant of the action and what it can tell us about the acting group.

We consider a generalization of low-rank matrix completion to the case where the data belongs to an algebraic variety, i.e., each data point is a solution to a system of polynomial equations. In this case, the original matrix is possibly high-rank, but it becomes low-rank after mapping each column to a higher dimensional space of monomial features. Many well-studied extensions of linear models, including affine subspaces and their union, can be described by a variety model. We study the sampling requirements for matrix completion under a variety model with a focus on a union of subspaces. We also propose an efficient matrix completion algorithm that minimizes a surrogate of the rank of the matrix of monomial features, which is able to recover synthetically generated data up to the predicted sampling complexity bounds. The proposed algorithm also outperforms standard low-rank matrix completion and subspace clustering techniques in experiments with real data.