Scientific

The discriminant of a space of functions is the closed subset consisting of the functions which are singular in some sense. For instance, for complex polynomials in one variable the discriminant is the locus of polynomials with multiple roots. In this special case, it is known by work of Arnol'd that the cohomology of the complement of the discriminant stabilizes when the degree of the polynomials grows, in the sense that the k-th cohomology group of the space of polynomials without multiple roots is independent of the degree of the polynomials considered. A more general set-up is to consider the space of non-singular sections of a very ample line bundle on a fixed non-singular variety. In this case, Vakil and Wood proved a stabilization behaviour for the class of complements of discriminants in the Grothendieck group of varieties. In this talk, I will discuss a topological approach for obtaining the cohomological counterpart of Vakil and Wood's result and describe stable cohomology explicitly for the space of complex homogeneous polynomials in a fixed number of variables and for spaces of smooth divisors on an algebraic curve.

Block sum of matrices define a group homomorphism $GL_n(R) \times GL_m(R) \to GL_{n+m}(R)$, which can be used to make the direct sum of $H_s(BGL_t(R);k)$ over all $s, t$ into a bigraded-commutative ring. A similar product may be defined on homology of mapping class groups of surfaces with one boundary component, as well as in many other examples of interest. These products have manifestations on various levels, for example there is a product on the level of spaces making the disjoint union of $BGL_n(R)$ into a homotopy commutative topological monoid. I will discuss how it, and other concrete examples, may be built by iterated cell attachments in the category of topological monoids, or better yet $E_2$ algebras, and what may be learned by this viewpoint. This is all joint work with Alexander Kupers and Oscar Randal-Williams.

This is the second lecture in a two part series: part 1

In this talk we will consider some families of varieties with actions of certain finite reflection groups – such as hyperplane complements or complex flag manifolds associated to these groups. The cohomology groups of these families stabilize in a precise representation theoretic sense. Our goal is to explain how these stability patterns manifest, and can be recovered from, as asymptotic stability of factorization statistics of related varieties defined over finite fields.

In this talk we discuss a new perspective on Quillen's devissage theorem. Originally, Quillen proved devissage for algebraic $K$-theory of abelian categories. The theorem showed that given a full abelian subcategory $\mathcal{A}$ of an abelian category $\mathcal{B}$, $K(\mathcal{A})\simeq K(\mathcal{B})$ if every object of $\mathcal{B}$ has a finite filtration with quotients lying in $\mathcal{A}$. This allows us, for example, to relate the $K$-theory of torsion $\mathbf{Z}$-modules to the $K$-theories of $\mathbf{F}_p$-modules for all $p$. Generalizations of this theorem to more general contexts for $K$-theory, such as Walhdausen categories, have been notoriously difficult; although some such theorems exist they are generally much more complicated to state and prove than Quillen's original. In this talk we show how to translate Quillen's algebraic approach to a geometric context. This translation allows us to construct a devissage theorem in geometry, and prove it using Quillen's original insights.

Block sum of matrices define a group homomorphism $GL_n(R) \times GL_m(R) \to GL_{n+m}(R)$, which can be used to make the direct sum of $H_s(BGL_t(R);k)$ over all $s, t$ into a bigraded-commutative ring. A similar product may be defined on homology of mapping class groups of surfaces with one boundary component, as well as in many other examples of interest. These products have manifestations on various levels, for example there is a product on the level of spaces making the disjoint union of $BGL_n(R)$ into a homotopy commutative topological monoid. I will discuss how it, and other concrete examples, may be built by iterated cell attachments in the category of topological monoids, or better yet $E_2$ algebras, and what may be learned by this viewpoint. This is all joint work with Alexander Kupers and Oscar Randal-Williams.

This is the first lecture in a two part series: part 2