Date & Time: Thursday, July 26, 2012 at 4 pm

Venue: Ramanujan Hall

Title: "Computational and Analytic aspects of Chern-Weil theory "

Speaker: Prof. Vamsi Pritham Pingali

Abstract: Vector bundles over manifolds are ubiquitous in geometry and topology. To study them, Cohomological invariants called Characteristic classes were invented. We shall take the Chern-Weil approach to them and explain how to compute the explicit representatives of these objects for some cases and illustrate a small application or two. Also, time-permitting, we shall delve into an analytic aspect which gives us interesting PDE to study.