12/8/2004

Shmuel Weinberger
University of Chicago

Universal Acyclic groups and the Morse landscape of certain distortion functionals

In this talk I will try to explain two tools that have been useful in the past few years: the first is the applications of finitely presented acyclic groups that contain all other finitely presented groups and the second is the use of ideas of logic to produce many critical points for certain functionals (pioneered by Nabutovsky).  Ideally, I will get to apply both together the study of nonsimply connected hypersurfaces in Euclidean space.