Rice University Math Department Calendar

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 31

4:00 pm Monday, April 22, 2013
Stulken Topology Seminar: Closed essential surfaces and the character variety
by Eric Chesebro (University of Montana) in HB 427

In the eighties, Culler and Shalen developed a procedure (while at Rice) for using the SL(2,C)-character variety for a 3-manifold to construct essential surfaces in the manifold. Since then, their techniques have been carefully studied and are critical in the proofs of several famous theorems. Most of the invesigation of the Culler-Shalen machinery has focused on the case when the associated essential surface has non-empty boundary. Here we will discuss a new characterization of when associated surfaces are closed.Host Department: Rice University-Mathematics
Submitted by shelly@rice.edu