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Geometry-Topology Seminar

Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - 4:30pm

Laurentiu Maxim

University of Wisconsin

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4N30

This is the first of two meetings of the Geometry-Topology Seminar this week.

By analogy with knot theory, complex hypersurfaces can be studied via Alexander-type invariants of their complements. I will discuss old and new results concerning rigidity properties of such invariants, including (twisted) Alexander polynomials, L^2-betti numbers, and Novikov homology. In relation to an old question of Serre, such rigidity results impose severe restrictions on the type of groups which can be realized as fundamental groups of complex hypersurface complements.