Date & Time: Wednesday, November 26, 2008, 16:00-17:00.
Venue: Ramanujan Hall
Title: From the Calabi Conjectures to the Automorphism Groups of Complex Manifolds
Speaker: Jaume Amorós, UPC-Barcelona
Abstract: In 1954, E. Calabi formulated two conjectures about the existence of Kähler-Einstein metrics and the canonical class on a complex manifold. Their proof was completed by S. T. Yau in 1976, giving rise to the class of Calabi-Yau manifolds, whose geometric properties have attracted the interest of mathematicians and physicists alike.
I will try to motivate the interest in these Calabi-Yau manifolds, and discuss how one of Calabi's conjectures extends from them to complex algebraic manifolds with a positive-dimensional automorphism group.