Mathematics - Florida State University
Home
Contacts
208 Love Building  Tallahassee, FL  32306-4510  Phone: (850) 644-2202  Fax: (850) 644-4053
Print
Pallavi Dani

Search:
 



SPECIAL MATHEMATICS COLLOQUIUM

Speaker: Pallavi Dani
Title: Filling Invariants for Groups
Affiliation: University of Oklahoma
Date: Thursday, January 31, 2008
Place and Time: Room 102, Love Building, 3:35-4:30 pm

Abstract. For any loop in a simply-connected Riemannian manifold, one can look for a disk of minimal area whose boundary is that loop. More generally, one can consider fillings of n-spheres by (n+1)-balls. These notions have natural analogues in the realm of finitely presented groups, where one models the group using suitably defined geometric spaces. I will discuss Dehn functions of groups, which capture the difficulty of filling spheres with balls. A fundamental question in the area is that of determining which functions arise as Dehn functions of groups. I will give an overview of known results and describe recent progress in the 2-dimensional case. This is joint work with Josh Barnard and Noel Brady.



------------------------------------

Home | Contact Us

Graduate Program | Undergrad Program | Research | People | Tech Support

Virtual Library | Student Resources | Faculty Resources | News & Events


Last modified: Friday January 25th, 2008