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Tag Archives: free groups
Faces of the scl norm ball
I am in Melbourne at the moment, in the middle of giving a lecture series, as part of the 2009 Clay-Mahler lectures (also see here). Yesterday I gave a lecture with the title “faces of the scl norm ball”, and … Continue reading
Posted in Dynamics, Groups, Surfaces
Tagged Bavard duality, free groups, immersions, maximal representation, quasimorphisms, Rigidity, rotation number, scl, Surfaces, Symplectic geometry
1 Comment
scl, sails and surgery
I have just uploaded a paper to the arXiv, entitled “Scl, sails and surgery”. The paper discusses a connection between stable commutator length in free groups and the geometry of sails. This is an interesting example of what sometimes happens … Continue reading
van Kampen soup and thermodynamics of DNA
The development and scope of modern biology is often held out as a fantastic opportunity for mathematicians. The accumulation of vast amounts of biological data, and the development of new tools for the manipulation of biological organisms at microscopic levels … Continue reading
Posted in Biology, Dynamics, Groups
Tagged biological computation, DNA, fatgraphs, free groups, Holliday junction, scl, thermodynamics, van Kampen diagrams
4 Comments
Quasimorphisms and laws
A basic reference for the background to this post is my monograph. Let be a group, and let denote the commutator subgroup. Every element of can be expressed as a product of commutators; the commutator length of an element is the … Continue reading
Groups with free subgroups (part 2)
In a previous post, I discussed some methods for showing that a given group contains a (nonabelian) free subgroup. The methods were analytic and/or dynamical, and phrased in terms of the existence (or nonexistence) of certain functions on or on … Continue reading
Groups with free subgroups
More ambitious than simply showing that a group is infinite is to show that it contains an infinite subgroup of a certain kind. One of the most important kinds of subgroup to study are free groups. Hence, one is interested … Continue reading
Posted in Groups
Tagged amenable groups, free groups, hyperbolic groups, laws, pingpong, Thompson's group, Tits alternative, von Neumann conjecture
3 Comments
The (strengthened) Hanna Neumann Conjecture
A few days ago, Joel Friedman posted a paper on the arXiv purporting to give a proof of the (strengthened) Hanna Neumann conjecture, a well-known problem in geometric group theory. Simply stated, the problem is as follows. Conjecture (Hanna Neumann): … Continue reading →