Positive curvature in Sasaki geometry

Speaker: 

Weiyong He

Institution: 

University of Oregon

Time: 

Tuesday, January 15, 2013 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

This is based on joint work with Song Sun.
As an analogue of Frankel conjecture (Mori, Siu-Yau theorem) in Kahler geometry, we
classify compact Sasaki manifolds with positive curvature by deforming metrics.
Roughly speaking, such Sasaki structure is a standard Sasaki structure on (odd
dimensional) spheres. Our theorem gives a new proof of Frankel conjecture as a
special case. We have also similar results as in Kahler setting for nonnegative
curvature.

An open mirror theorem for toric varieties

Speaker: 

Siu-Cheong Lau

Institution: 

Harvard University

Time: 

Tuesday, January 8, 2013 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

Mirror map is a central object in the study of mirror symmetry. They are obtained in hypergeometric series by solving Picard-Fuchs equations. In this talk, I will explain a geometric meaning of mirror maps for toric varieties in terms of counting of holomorphic discs bounded by Lagrangian submanifolds. It is motivated by the study of SYZ mirror symmetry. This is a joint work with K. Chan, N.-C. Leung and H.-H. Tseng.

Symplectic harmonic forms and the Federer-Fleming deformation theorem

Speaker: 

Yi Lin

Institution: 

Georgia Southern University

Time: 

Tuesday, March 5, 2013 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

Symplectic harmonic theory was initiated by Ehresmann and Libermann in 1940's, and was rediscoverd by Brylinski in late 1980's. More recently, Bahramgiri showed in his MIT thesis that symplectic harmonic representatives of Thom classes exhibited some interesting global feature of symplectic geometry. In this talk, we discuss a new approach to symplectic Harmonic theory via geometric measure theory. The new method allows us to establish a fundamental property on symplectic harmonic forms, which is a non-trivial generalization of Bahramgiri's result, and enables us to provide a complete solution to an open question asked by V. Guillemin concerning symplectic harmonic representatives of Thom classes.  This talk is based on a very recent work of the speaker.

J-holomorphic curves in a nef class

Speaker: 

Tian-Jun Li

Institution: 

University of Minnesota

Time: 

Tuesday, January 29, 2013 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

We investigate properties of reducible J-holomorphic subvarieties in 4-manifolds. We offer an upper bound of the total genus of a subvariety when the class of the subvariety is J-nef.

For a spherical class, it has particularly strong consequences: for any tamed J, each irreducible component is a smooth rational curve. We also completely classify configurations of maximal dimension. To prove these results we treat subvarieties as weighted graphs and introduce several combinatorial moves. This is a joint work with Weiyi Zhang.

Rational analogs of projective planes

Speaker: 

Zhixu Su

Institution: 

UC Irvine

Time: 

Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

There does not exist closed manifold along the line of projective planes
above the dimension of octonions due to the inexistence of hopf invariant
1 map in higher dimensions. I investigated the existence dimension of such
manifold in the rational sense, such that the rational cohomology is rank
one in dimension 0, 2k and 4k and is zero otherwise. Applying rational
surgery, the problem can be reduced to finding possible Pontryagin classes
satisfying the Hirzebruch signature formula and a set of congruence relations
determined by the Riemann-Roch integrality conditions, which is eventually
equivalent to solving a system of Diophantine equations. After a negative
answer in dimension 24, the first existence dimension of such manifold is 32.

Waning holonomy and the limits of tangent bundles

Speaker: 

Pedro Solorzano

Institution: 

UC Riverside

Time: 

Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

For any convergent sequence of Riemannian spaces, it is
possible to extract a subsequence for which their corresponding
tangent bundles converge as well. These limits sometimes coincide
with preexisting notions of tangency, but not always. In the process
of understanding the structure of the limiting space, a couple of
natural elementary constructions are introduced at the level of
the individual Riemannian spaces. Lastly, a weak notion of parallelism is
discussed for the limits.

An introduction to the rational genus of a knot

Speaker: 

Zhongtao Wu

Institution: 

Caltech

Time: 

Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

What is the "simplest" knot in a given three-manifold Y?
We know that the answer is the unknot when Y=S^3, as the unknot
happens to be the only knot in the three-sphere with the smallest
genus (=0). In this talk, we will discuss the more general notion of
the rational genus of knots. In particular, we will show that the
simple knots are really the "simplest" knots in the lens spaces in
the sense of being a genus minimizer in its homology class. This is
a joint work with Yi Ni.

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