Department of Mathematics

Speaker: Kate Petersen
Title: Character Varieties and 3-Manifolds
Affiliation: Florida State University
Date: Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Place and Time: Room 101, Love Building, 3:35-4:30 pm
Refreshments: Room 204, Love Building, 3:00 pm

Abstract.The character variety of a 3-manifold is a moduli space encoding all hyperbolic structures on the manifold. These varieties encode a wealth of information about the underlying 3-manifold. For example, Culler and Shalen proved that these varieties can detect surfaces in the 3-manifold and splittings of its fundamental group. However, these varieties are difficult to compute and little is known about their structure. I will introduce the character variety, and discuss the interplay between the structure of these moduli spaces and the structure of the 3-manifold.