March 1, 2018
Mathematics Colloquium Lecture today
Yasha Eliashberg, Stanford University, will present "From Differential Topology to Symplectic and Back" as part of the Mathematics Department Colloquium Lecture series at 2:30 p.m. Thursday, March 1, in 102 Cardwell Hall.
The abstract for the lecture is: There are several canonical symplectic geometric constructions which can be performed on smooth manifolds. For instance, the cotangent bundle of a smooth manifold has a canonical symplectic structure, and one can ask whether the symplectomorphism type of the cotangent bundle remembers the smooth topology of the manifold. In the opposite direction any affine 2n-dimensional Weinstein manifold — which is the symplectic counterpart of a Stein complex manifold — can be viewed as the cotangent bundle of a possibly singular n-dimensional complex, and one can ask whether symplectic invariants can be described in terms of smooth topology of this complex. Eliashberg will discuss the interplay between these two directions.