Rice Topology Seminar 

 Fall 2006/Spring  2007


Unless a change is noted, the Rice Topology Seminar takes place Mondays at 4pm in 427 Hermann Brown.  If there is an outside speaker we will have coffee, tea and cookies at 3:40pm in the lounge.

Click on the title of a talk for the abstract (if available).

DateSpeaker Title
August 28Keiko Kawamuro (Rice)The Algebraic Crossing Number and Braid Index of Knots and Links
September 4NO MEETING LABOR DAY HOLIDAY
September 11Barry Simon (Cal Tech) Porter Lecture
September 18Barry Simon (Cal Tech) Porter Lecture
September 25No meeting
October 2Keiko Kawamuro (Rice) Non-sharpness of the Morton-Franks-Williams inequality
October 9Lenny Ng (Duke University)Knot theory and contact geometry I
October 16NO MEETING FALL RECESS
January 22 Eric Chesebro (Rice)Trace fields and commensurability of link complements
January 29Maggy Tomova (Rice)Comparing Bridge Surfaces
February 5Maggy Tomova (Rice)continuation
February 12
February 15Eaman Eftekhary (Harvard) HB227 Heegaard Floer homology and essential tori
February 19
February 26Stephan Tillmann (UQAM)Volume of Representations
March 1John Etnyre (Georgia Tech) HB 227Open books decompositions and contact geometry
March 2John Etnyre (Georgia Tech) HB 453The space of plane fields on a 3-manifold
March 5No Seminar Spring Recess
March 12No Seminar Porter Lectures
March 19No Seminar Porter Lectures
March 26Jamie Jorgenson TBA
March 27Benson Farb (Wolf Lecture) (U. Chicago) Parallels between moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces and locally symmetric spaces
April 2Robert Lipshitz (Columbia University)Recent progress in computing Heegaard-Floer Homology
April 9Jake Rasmussen (Princeton) Hecke algebras and HOMFLY homology of torus knots
April 12Cameron Gordon (U. Texas Austin) HB 227The Unknotting Number of a Knot
April 13Olga Plamanevskaya (SUNY Stony Brook) HB 227A combinatorial description of the Heegaard Floer contact invariant
April 16Jessica Purcell (U. Texas Austin) TBA
April 23
April 30

 Spring  2006

January 12
Stefano Vidussi (U.C. Riverside)
Colloquium

       
January 19
Vladimir Markovic (Warwick)
Special Lecture
January 23
Andrew Elliot (Rice)
Heegaard Splittings and Morse Theory
February 2
Scott Baldridge (LSU)
Symplectic 4-Manifolds with prescribed fundamental groups
February 13
Tim Cochran
Osvath-Szabo working seminar
February 20
Vorobetz
Free Self-Similar Groups
February 27
Oliver Dasbach (LSU)
The colored Jones polynomial vs. the hyperbolic volume
March 2
Cipran Manolescu (Columbia)
Colloquium: Knot Homology Theories from Symplectic Geometry
March 6
Shelly Harvey (Rice)
Homology and Derived Series of Groups II: Dwyer's Theorem
March 7
Lee Rudolph (Clark)
"Circle-valued Morse maps on knot and link complements"
March 13
NO MEETING
SPRING BREAK
March 20
Tim Cochran Rice)

Generalizations of Gropes and Series of Groups
March 27
Eric Chesebro (U. Texas Austin)
Undetected boundary slopes
April 3
Tim Cochran and Shelly Harvey
Homological Stability of Series of Groups
April 10
Andrew Elliot (Rice)
An Introduction to Khovanov Homology: I
April 24
Genevieve Walsh (U. Texas Austin)
Surfaces in finite covers and the group determinant
May 2
Jer-Chin Luke Chuang (Rice)
Combinatorial Analogues to Transgression Forms Arising from the Chern-Weil Theory of Characteristic Classes
June 12
Elisenda Grigsby (Columbia)
Knot Floer Homology and Covers

 Fall  2005

August 15
Connie Leidy (U Pennsylvania)
Higher-order Alexander Invariants of Curve Complements
August 22
Stefan Friedl (Rice)
Reidemeister torsion, the Thurston norm and Harvey's monotonicity results
August 29
Stefan Friedl
continued
September 8
Danny Calegari (Cal Tech)
Shrinkwrapping and the Tameness Conjecture
September 12
Jamie Jorgenson (Rice)
Casson-Gordon Invariants for Dummies
September 19
Taehee Kim (Rice)
"The parity of the Cochran-Harvey invariants".
September 26
NO SPEAKER- FACULTY MEETING

October 3
Stefan Friedl (Rice)
Eta Invariants and Casson-Gordon Invariants
October 6
Brendan Owens (LSU)

Unknotting Numbers of Knots
October 20
Daniel Ruberman (Brandeis)
Rochlin's Invariant and Gauge Theory
October 24
Tara Brendle (LSU)
The Birman-Craggs-Johnson homomorphism and the homology of the Torelli group
October 27
Sergio Fenley (FSU)
What can a flow say about the .....
October 31
Tim Cochran (Rice)
Expository Lecture on Massey Products and Chen's Integrals
November 7
Bochner Lecture: Denis Auroux (MIT)
Lefschetz fibrations and symplectic 4-manifolds
November 14
David Cimasoni (U.C. Berkeley)
"Computing abelian invariants of colored links"


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This page is maintained by Shelly Harvey and Tim Cochran.