Location: room 611 of the Wiskunde building (campus De Uithof) Budapestlaan 6, Utrecht.

Date and time: Thursday, March 11, 2010 15:30-16:30. The lecture is preceded by coffee, tea, and cookies from 15.00 to 15.30 hour in the same room.

From hyperbolic to symplectic geometry


Joel Fine

(Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Abstract: My aim is to explain how it is possible to use hyperbolic geometry to construct interesting symplectic manifolds. This is joint work with Dmitri Panov (Imperial College, London). I will begin with a brief introduction to symplectic geometry. I will describe how coadjoint orbits of Lie groups are naturally symplectic manifolds and then explain how to exploit this for the group of isomteries of hyperbolic 4-space. The examples we find this way have the additional property that they are "Calabi-Yau" (a term I will explain). Finally, I will describe how to find a simply connected symplectic Calabi-Yau manifold starting from a beautiful hyperbolic 4-manifold called the Davis manifold. No prior knowledge of symplectic geometry will be assumed.

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