Date & Time: Tuesday, 29th May, 2012 at 4 p.m.
Venue: Ramanujan Hall
Speaker: Prof. Michael Hopkins
About the Speaker : Michael J Hopkins is a professor of mathematics at Harvard
University since 2005 after spending 15 years at MIT. He was a plenary speaker
at the Zurich ICM in 1994. He received the Veblen Prize for Geometry in 2001.
His work concentrates on stable homotopy theory. It concerns Ravenel
conjectures, Hopkins-Miller Theorem and topological modular forms, Kervaire
invariant problem, K-theory, loop groups and topological field theories.
Abstract: The Kervaire invariant problem is one of the oldest questions in
algebraic and differential topology. It impacts both the classification of
manifolds and the homotopy groups of spheres. This lecture will be devoted to
the long history of the Kervaire invariant problem, and the different places it
arises in algebraic and differential topology.