We've seen Gauss's double linking integral in R^3, and Haggai's triple linking integral in R^3. The purpose of this talk is to describe higher dimensional 2-component linking in Heisenberg groups, and to show an explicit isometry invariant formula for the linking number of an embedding of S^k with S^j in the 2n+1 dimensional Heisenberg group. We will describe the problems that are introduced by working with the Heisenberg group rather than R^n and the methods we used to get around those.
Graduate Student Geometry-Topology Seminar
Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - 3:00pm
Paul Gallagher
UPenn