April 26, 2025 at Brown University

GATSBY is a conference organized by the geometry/topology groups at Brown and Yale. 

All are welcome! Please register. 

Schedule (all events in Kassar House) 

10:45-11:15 Coffee, light breakfast (Kassar common room)

11:15-12:15 Background talk (Foxboro auditorium)

12:15-2 Lunch (catered, Kassar common room)

2-3 Lightning talks (Foxboro auditiorium)

3-3:30 Break

3:30-4:30 Research talk (Foxboro auditorium)

4:30 Informal discussion followed by dinner for those interested

Abstracts 

• Principal speaker

Graph braid groups and their topological complexity

Graph braid groups are the fundamental groups of the 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.

• Lightning talks

Tianqi Wang (Yale): Domains of simple stable representations

Joshua Perlmutter (Brandeis): Graph products of Morse local-to-global groups

Dongryul Kim (Yale): Singularity of Stationary measures and Patterson–Sullivan measures for Mapping Class Groups

Robbie Lyman (Rutgers): Metric structures on groups

Youheng Yao (Yale): Finite covers and A-polynomials

Marwa Mosallam (Binghamton): Matroids and curves on surfaces

Sungjin Park (Yale): Skinning maps of geometric limits

Rachmiel Klein (Brandeis): The mapping class group of graphs 

Becca Winarski (Holy Cross): The transitivity of pure Hurwitz classes of dynamical branched covers of the sphere

Local information

The talks will be in the math department (Kassar House) on 151 Thayer Street, at the corner of George and Thayer Streets. The entrance to the department is on Thayer Street. 

Parking: There is visitor parking at 111 Power Street (~$15-20/day). The nearest free, unrestricted street parking on Cooke Street (e.g. in front of the Rhode Island historical society), or in that general area, further west of campus. There should be plenty of available parking in that area, but individual blocks have different parking restrictions so please read the parking signs carefully. 

Organizers:  Tam Cheetham-West, Ethan Dlugie, Yair Minsky, Eduardo Reyes, Bena Tshishiku, Tianqi Wang

Previous iterations: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2019, Fall 2015, Spring  2015, Fall 2014, Spring 2014, Fall 2013,  Spring 2013, Spring 2012