2016 Distinguished Lecture by Professor Mladen Bestvina

Lecturer  Mladen Bestvina (University of Utah)

Venue  Rm.1501, Natural Sciences B/D E6-1, KAIST

Abstract  As envisioned by Gromov, geometric group theory is the study of large-scale geometry of groups. The key idea is to study groups as metric spaces. Examples of large-scale invariants are the isoperimetric function and asymptotic dimension, and I will focus on the latter. The class of groups where this is all well understood is the class of hyperbolic groups. However, groups of interest are often not hyperbolic, but they can be sometimes understood in terms of hyperbolicity. The basic example is the mapping class group of a surface. If time permits, I will explain the main ideas in the proof, due to Bromberg, Fujiwara and myself, that mapping class groups have finite asymptotic dimension.



Organizer  Ko, Ki Hyoung