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Penn Mathematics Colloquium

Wednesday, February 5, 2003 - 4:30pm

Karen Vogtmann

Cornell University

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL A6

Tea will be served at 4:00 PM in DRL 4E17

Outer Space is a continuous space which paramaterizes graphs with a fixed (free) fundamental group. It was introduced in the mid 1980's to study automorphism groups of free groups. In this talk I will describe Outer Space, and explain how it is related to various chain complexes of graphs used by M. Kontsevich to study the homology of certain infinite-dimensional Lie algebras. I will also describe joint work with J. Conant, in which geometric insights gained from this perspective help to clarify some new algebraic structures which we defined on these chain complexes.