Conference Program: https://web.math.princeton.edu/~petero/Browder/Browder.html

9:30 AM — 10:30 AM
Speaker: Maggie Miller
Location: Lewis Library 120 (Registered Attendees) Lewis Library 121 (Overflow/Walk-In viewing)

 Stong’s Kervaire--Milnor invariant

In the 1960s, Kervaire showed that every knotted 2-sphere in S^4 is slice into B^5, using ambient spin surgeries. It remains unknown whether every link of 2-spheres is slice. In this talk, I’ll discuss a slice obstruction (for knotted spheres) developed by Stong, how it extends to a more general concordance obstruction, and (potentially!) to links of spheres. This is mostly based on joint work with Michael Klug.

11:00 AM — 12:00 PM
Speaker: Andrew Blumberg
Location: Lewis Library 120 (Registered Attendees) Lewis Library 121 (Overflow/Walk-In viewing)

Multiplicative structures in Floer homotopy theory

This talk will survey on-going work with Abouzaid to understand the multiplicative structures that arise in the context of the stable infinity category of Flow categories.

1:15 PM — 2:15 PM
Speaker: Gianmarco Caldini
Location: Lewis Library 120 (Registered Attendees) Lewis Library 121 (Overflow/Walk-In viewing)

Homotopy with holes and minimal surfaces  

Although Bill's later research mostly focused on group actions and group cohomology, in the 1980s he also began a program with Frederick J. Almgren aimed at studying the regularity of minimal surfaces with tools and techniques from differential topology and homotopy theory. This led them to announce the solution to basic questions in geometric measure theory and, in particular, in the Federer-Fleming theory of integral currents; however, the project was never finished and no proof of the announced results ever appeared. In this seminar I will describe a joint study with Bill and Camillo De Lellis in which we complete the program started with Almgren, providing a full answer to the question of how closely one can approximate an integral current representing an integral homology class by a smooth submanifold.

2:30 PM — 3:30 PM
Speaker: Julia Pevtsova
Location: Lewis Library 120 (Registered Attendees) Lewis Library 121 (Overflow/Walk-In viewing)

Tensor triangular geometry in modular representation theory

This talk is about a geometric take on the modular representation theory and cohomology of finite groups, along with a number of their friends and cousins. We’ll start with a quick introduction to tensor triangular geometry and explain how it relates to Quillen’s 1971 stratification theorem via pretty pictures. We’ll then move on to more modern stories, where these friends and cousins appear in the guise of finite Hopf algebras.

4:15 PM — 5:45 PM
Speaker: Alejandro Adem, Chair
Location: Lewis Library 120 (Registered Attendees) Lewis Library 121 (Overflow/Walk-In viewing)

A Panel of Browder Students

Sylvain Cappell, Santiago López de Medrano, Dennis Sullivan