4. Geometry and Topology seminar
Speaker: Ramesh Kasilingam (IITM)
Time, day and date: 4:00:00 PM - 5:00:00 PM, Friday, November 22
Venue: Ramanujan Hall
Title: Aspherical Manifolds : Historical Insights and Recent Progress in
Topology
Abstract : We report recent progress on various open and interesting
problems related to aspherical manifolds, i.e., connected, closed
manifolds whose universal coverings are contractible. There are many
well-known examples, such as closed Riemannian manifolds with non-positive
sectional curvature, but also very exotic examples such as
closed aspherical manifolds that do not admit a triangulation. We also
discuss important conjectures, including the Borel Conjecture, the
Hopf-Singer Conjecture, and the Farrell-Jones Conjecture.