Instructor: Timothy Riley

Mondays & Wednesdays
1:00pm–2:15pm, MLT206

Office hours by appointment, MLT403

Synopsis

We will explore major themes of geometric group theory:

I. Dehn's word, conjugacy and isomorphism problems

II. Growth and amenability

III. Quasi-isometric rigidity

The common format of a Berstein Seminar has the participants giving many of the talks. While I hope to include this valuable component to some degree, I plan to lead most classes myself.

References

Bestvina, Sageev, Vogtmann Eds., Geometric Group Theory, IAS/Park City Vol 21, 2014

Bux, Groups and Spaces, Lecture Notes, 2007

Brady, Riley, & Short, The Geometry of the Word Problem for Finitely Generated Groups, 2007

Bridson & Haefliger, Metric spaces of non-positive curvature, 1999

Clay & Margalit (Eds.), Office Hours with a Geometric Group Theorist, 2017

Dehn, Papers on Group Theory and Topology, translated by Stillwell

Drutu & Kapovich, Geometric group theory, 2017

Gromov, Asymptotic Invariants, 1991

Löh, Geometric Group Theory, 2017

Lyndon & Schupp, Combinatorial group theory, 1977

Assessment

Undergraduates requiring a formal grade on this course may be asked to do some exercises and give a presentation.

Office hours

Office hours are by appointment in MLT 403. Please do not interpret this as no office hours! Further, I hope that this course will provoke stimulating discussion among the participants both in and outside classtime.