Menu

About

This is an undergraduate student seminar on geometry and topology. This semester, we will be working from Scorpan's The wild world of 4-manifolds. We meet on Thursdays 4:20–6:10 pm in Liyuan 1-203.

Here is a course description if you wish to register for credit.

Talks

Mar 11 '21, Wenbo Liao, Introduction to h-cobordism theorem and Poincare conjecture

Mar 18, '21, Jinghao Yu, Handle decomposition, notes

Mar 25 '21, Ruoyu Xu, The Whitney trick

Apr 1, '21, Xiabing Ruan, Topological h-cobordism theorem for 4-manifolds, notes

Apr 8, '21, Siyu Cen, Homology 3-spheres bound fake 4-balls

Apr 15, '21, Yuqing Xing, Intersection forms

Apr 22, '21, Yuqing Xing, Intersection forms (cont'd), notes

Apr 29, '21, Changqian Li, K3 surfaces, notes

May 6, '21, Siyu Cen, Whitehead's theorem and homotopy type

May 13, '21, Pengcheng Li, Wall's theorems and h-cobordisms

May 20, '21, Yidan 307, Pengcheng Li, Wall's theorems and h-cobordisms (cont'd), notes

Jun 9, '21, 10 am-12 pm, Yidan 307, Wenbo Liao, Characteristic classes and spin structures, notes

Jun 23, '21, 3-5 pm, Yidan 307, Wenbo Liao and Xiabing Ruan, Characteristic classes and spin structures in dimension 4; characteristic elements and Rokhlin's theorem, notes

Further reading

Joshua Evan Greene, Heegaard Floer homology (a treasure map to low-dimensional topology).