Penn Arts & Sciences Logo

Geometry-Topology Seminar

Thursday, November 29, 2012 - 3:30pm

John Pardon

Stanford University

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4C8

Note the special time. This is a joint seminar with Temple, Haverford and Bryn Mawr. Refreshments at 4:30 in DRL 4E17.

Hilbert's Fifth Problem asks whether every topological group which is a manifold is in fact a (smooth!) Lie group; this was solved in the affirmative by Gleason and Montgomery--Zippin. A stronger conjecture is that a locally compact topological group which acts faithfully on a manifold must be a Lie group. This is the Hilbert--Smith Conjecture, which in full generality is still wide open. It is known, however (as a corollary to the work of Gleason and Montgomery--Zippin) that it suffices to rule out the case of the additive group of p-adic integers acting faithfully on a manifold. I will present a solution in dimension three. The proof uses tools from low-dimensional topology, for example incompressible surfaces, minimal surfaces, and a property of the mapping class group.