Penn Arts & Sciences Logo

Deformation Theory Seminar

Wednesday, April 16, 2008 - 2:00pm

Matthew Miller

Bucknell College

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4N30

The goal of this talk is to construct rational models for configuration spaces of two points in three dimensional lens spaces. We will begin by discussing Longoni and Salvatore's counterexample to the conjecture that two homotopy equivalent manifolds (of the same dimension) have homotopy equivalent configuration spaces. In extending their methods we will see that there are significant difficulties with both the geometric computation of Massey products, and distinguishing the resulting rational models. Our results make use of Sinha and Walter's new work on Lie coalgebras and rational homotopy theory.