Date | 2014-10-14 |
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Speaker | Michael Brandenbursky |
Dept. | CRM, Univ. Montreal |
Room | 129-104 |
Time | 17:00-18:00 |
In this talk I will define quasi-homomorphisms from braid groups to the concordance group of knots and examine its properties and consequences of its existence. In particular, I will provide a relation between the stable four ball genus in the concordance group and the stable commutator length in braid groups, and produce examples of infinite families of concordance classes of knots with uniformly bounded four ball genus. I will also provide applications to the geometry of the infinite braid group. In particular, I will show that its commutator subgroup admits a stably unbounded conjugation invariant norm. This answers an open problem posed by Burago, Ivanov and Polterovich. If time permits I will describe an interesting connection between the concordance group of knots and number theory. This work is partially joint with Jarek Kedra.