Four perspectives on the (pure) braid groups, OR an introduction to representation stability
Time and place
1 PM on Thursday, November 19th, 2015;
Jenny Wilson (Stanford University)
Abstract
In this talk I will describe Artin's braid groups, and how they may be generalized to larger families of groups and spaces from geometry, topology, algebra, and combinatorics. We will encounter configuration spaces of manifolds, complements of hyperplane arrangements, motion groups, and mapping class groups of punctured surfaces. Each of these families exhibits a phenomenon called representation stability. In the second half of the talk I will give an overview of the theory of representation stability and recent directions in the field.
