February 1st: Ara Basmajian (CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College)
(Short organizational meeting and talk)
Title: Length of the Möbius group with respect to various conjugacy classes of involutions
February 8th: Gregory Fein (Rutgers University)
Title: Hyperbolicity of the complex of curves of surfaces of finite type
February 15th: No meeting
February 22nd: Robert Suzzi Valli (CUNY Graduate Center)
Title: Transformations of pants decompositions
March 1st: Robert Suzzi Valli (CUNY Graduate Center)
Title: Transformations of pants decompositions (continued)
March 8th: No meeting
March 15th: Joseph Maher (CUNY College of Staten Island)
Title: Dehn twists generate the mapping class group
March 22nd: Genevieve Walsh (Tufts University)
Title: An introduction to orbifolds
March 29th: Youngju Kim (Korea Institute for Advanced Study)
Title: Quasiconformal conjugacy classes of Heisenberg group automorphisms
April 5th: Youngju Kim (Korea Institute for Advanced Study)
Title: Quasiconformal conjugacy classes of Heisenberg group automorphisms (continued)
April 10th: Andrew Silverio (Rutgers University)
Title: Deformation theory and planar families
Abstract: I will introduce the planar families of discrete groups identified by Gilman and Keen. Also, I will try to present a rapid overview of deformation theory of Kleinian groups inspired by Teichmüller theory. The deformation theory is an elegant tool in relating the elements of a planar family via quasiconformal maps.
April 17th: Ara Basmajian (CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College)
Title: Collar neighborhoods of geodesics and extremal length calculations (part 2)
April 19th: No meeting
April 26th: No meeting
May 3rd: Abhijit Champanerkar (CUNY College of Staten Island)
Title: Volumes of hyperbolic 3-manifolds
Abstract: We will show how to compute volumes of hyperbolic 3-manifolds, see some examples, and discuss open problems.
May 10th: Abhijit Champanerkar (CUNY College of Staten Island)
Title: Volumes of hyperbolic 3-manifolds (continued)
May 17th: No meeting
May 24th: Sara Maloni (University of Warwick)
Title: Bers-Maskit slices of the quasi-Fuchsian space
Abstract: Given a surface S, Kra's plumbing construction endows S with a projective structure for which the associated holonomy representation f depends on the `plumbing parameters' ti. In this talk we will describe a more general plumbing construction which gives us a group G in a particular slice of the quasi-Fuchsian space QF(S) (instead of the Maskit one given by Kra's plumbing construction). Using the complex Fenchel-Nielsen coordinates for QF(S), we can describe this slice, called the Bers-Maskit slice BM(S), as a subset of the slice where the length parameters take a fixed real value. Then one can see that, as these values tend to zero, the slices BM(S) tend to the Maskit slice M(S). The Bers-Maskit slice are also a connected component of the more general linear slices L(S). Some results about those slices will be described.
Diversity and Inclusion at the GC