A useful tool to study a 3-manifold is the space of the
representations of its fundamental group, a.k.a. the 3-manifold group, into
a Lie group. Any 3-manifold can be decomposed as the union of two
handlebodies. Thus, representations of the 3-manifold group into a Lie group
can be obtained by intersecting representation varieties of the two
handlebodies. Casson utilized this observation to define his celebrated
invariant. Later Taubes introduced an alternative approach to define Casson
invariant using more geometric objects. By building on Taubes' work, Floer
refined Casson invariant into a graded vector space whose Euler
characteristic is twice the Casson invariant.  The Atiyah-Floer conjecture
states that Casson's original approach can be also used to define a graded
vector space and the resulting invariant of 3-manifolds is isomorphic to
Floer's theory. In this talk, after giving some background, I will give an
exposition of what is known about the Atiyah-Floer conjecture and discuss
some recent progress, which is based on a joint work with Kenji Fukaya and
Maksim Lipyanskyi. I will only assume a basic background in algebraic
topology and geometry.

A general theme in differential/complex geometry is that curvature positivity conditions imposes strong geometric and topological constraint on the underlying manifold. In this talk, I will discuss a new curvature positivity condition in Hermitian geometry and prove a liouville type theorem for (1, 1)-forms for manifolds satisfying the positivity condition. I will discuss various interactions between this curvature condition and other notions in Hermitian geometry. Lastly, I will discuss some examples and potential applications. 

One can regard a self-map on a space as a dynamical system, and study its
long-term behavior under larger iterations. In this talk, we will introduce
the categorical version of such dynamical systems, and establish invariants
that one can associate to endofunctors of categories from the dynamical
perspective. We will also explain some results on categorical dynamical
systems that are related to holomorphic dynamics, symplectic dynamics,
Teichmuller theory, and Poincare rotation numbers. No background in
dynamical systems is assumed for this talk.

We construct K ̈ahler-Einstein metric with negative curvature near an isolated log canonical singularity by solving Monge-Amp`ere equation with Dirichlet boundary. We continue to consider the geometry of the Kahler-Einstein metric we constructed. In particular, in complex dimension 2, we show that all complete local K ̈ahler-Einstein metrics near isolated singularity are asymptotic the same as the model metric constructed by Kobayashi and Nakamura.

Link:  https://uci.zoom.us/j/91999884028

Rapidly oscillating functions associated with Lagrangian submanifolds play a fundamental role in semi-classical analysis. In this talk I will describe how to associate spaces of semi-classical oscillatory functions to isotropic submanifolds of phase space, and sketch their symbol calculus. As a special case we obtain the semi-classical version of the Hermite distributions of Boutet the Monvel and Guillemin. I will also discuss a couple applications of the theory. This is based on joint works with Victor Guillemin and Alejandro Uribe.