Brandeis Topology Seminar, Spring 2025

Organizers: Carolyn Abbott (carolynabbott@brandeis.edu), Dani Álvarez-Gavela (dgavela@brandeis.edu) Kiyoshi Igusa (igusa@brandeis.edu), Thomas Ng (thomasng@brandeis.edu), Danny Ruberman (ruberman@brandeis.edu)

January 16: No seminar

January 23: Kasia Jankiewicz (UCSC / IAS).

Title: Graph braid groups and their topological complexity

Abstract: Graph braid groups are the fundamental groups of configuration spaces of particles in a graph. They can be expressed as the fundamental groups of special cube complexes. In the introductory part, I will discuss those groups, some of their properties, and their associated cube complexes. In the second part, I will talk about my joint work with Kevin Schreve, where we study a question of whether certain sets of elements in a graph braid group generate a right-angled Artin group, and use it to compute the topological complexity of graph braid groups with sufficiently many particles.

January 30: No seminar (colloquium)

February 6: Chenyang Wu (Brandeis)

February 13:

February 20: No seminar

February 27:

March 6:

March 13: Jonathan Zung (MIT)

March 20: 

March 27: Lea Kenigsberg (UC Davis)

April 3:

April 10: Nima Hoda (Tufts)

April 17: No seminar

April 24: Brandis Whitfield (Temple)

May 1: Michelle Chu (U Minnesota)