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Penn Mathematics Colloquium

Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - 3:30pm

Cameron Gordon

UT Austin

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL A6

Tea before the talk at 3pm in the 4th floor math lounge

The fundamental group is a more or less complete invariant of a 3-dimensional manifold. We will discuss how the purely algebraic question of whether or not this group has a left-invariant total order appears to be related to two other, seemingly quite different, properties of the manifold, one geometric and the other essentially analytic.