Fall 2025
Time & Location: All talks are on Monday in Gibson Hall ___ at 2:00 PM unless otherwise noted.
Organizer: Komendarczyk, Rafal
October 29,
Title: Persistent homology of function spaces
Speaker: Fedor Manin - University of Toronto (Host): Rafal Komendarczyk
Abstract: Suppose you're given two homotopic maps between spaces. Does a homotopy between them have to pass through much more geometrically complicated maps? More generally, if you have a homologically trivial cycle in a function space, is it possible to trivialize it in the subspace of maps that are not too complicated? This can be thought of as studying the "Morse landscape" of a height function on the mapping space. In joint work with Jonathan Block and Shmuel Weinberger, we make this precise using the language of persistent homology and give some first results.
Location: Gibson Hall 400D
Time: 2:00
