Early Career Symposium for Topology, Actions, and Symmetry

Talks

Principal speakers

Prof. Stephen Theriault (University of Southampton): Polyheadral products in homotopy theory

The talk will start with an overview describing what polyhedral products are and how they appear in many different areas of mathematics, including homotopy theory and geometric group theory. Leaning towards homotopy theory, we will go on to consider current research directions, including what is known and what is not known.

Prof. Alina Vdovina (CUNY): Buildings, C*-algebras and new higher-dimensional non-residually finite and simple groups

We present explicit constructions of new infinite families of CW-complexes of arbitrary dimension with buildings as the universal covers. These complexes give rise to new families of C*-algebras, classifiable by their K-theory. The underlying building structure allows explicit computation of the K-theory. We will also present the first infinite series of quaternionic groups of finite characteristic and non-residually finite groups acting on cubes complexes and new higher-dimensional generalizations of the Thompson groups. Such types of groups are usually difficult to distinguish, but the K-theory of C*-algebras gives new complete invariants. We plan to finish with a long list of open problems which can be tackled by our methods. 

Contributed talks

Full schedule with titles and abstracts