Departmental Colloquium

Event Information The Alexander Trick for homology spheres
16:10 on Wednesday April 03, 2024
17:00 on Wednesday April 03, 2024
BA6183, Bahen Center, 40 St. George St.
Soren Galatius

University of Copenhagen

If Δ is a contractible compact d-manifold, then its boundary Σ will be a homology (d-1)-sphere, but the boundary need not be simply connected and Δ need not be homeomorphic to the d-disk. In joint work with Randal-Williams, we show that the topological group consisting of homeomorphisms of Δ fixing the boundary pointwise, is nevertheless contractible assuming d≥6. In the special case of the d-disk this was proved in 1923 by Alexander, by writing down an explicit homotopy now known as the Alexander trick.