Print

Print


Fibered ribbon knots vs. major 4D conjectures
Location: Harvard University Science Center Hall A & via Zoom webinar
Dates: Feb 20 & 22, 2024
Time: 4:00-5:30 pm

Register online at https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/mathscibott_2024

Maggie Miller is an assistant professor in the mathematics department at the University of Texas at Austin and a Clay Research Fellow.
This will be the fourth annual Math Science Lecture Series held in Honor of Raoul Bott.

Feb. 20, 2024
4:00-5:30 pm
Title: Fibered ribbon knots and the Poincaré conjecture
Abstract: A knot is “fibered” if its complement in S^3 is the total space of a bundle over the circle, and ribbon if it bounds a smooth disk into B^4 with no local maxima with respect to radial height. A theorem of Casson-Gordon from 1983 implies that if a fibered ribbon knot does not bound any fibered disk in B^4, then the smooth 4D Poincaré conjecture is false. I’ll show that unfortunately (?) many ribbon disks bounded by fibered knots are fibered, giving some criteria for extending fibrations and discuss how one might search for non-fibered examples.
 
Feb. 22, 2024
4:00-5:30 pm
Title: Fibered knots and the slice-ribbon conjecture
Abstract: The slice-ribbon conjecture (Fox, 1962) posits that if a knot bounds any smooth disk into B^4, it also bounds a ribbon disk. The previously discussed work of Casson-Gordon yields an obstruction to many fibered knots being ribbon, yielding many interesting potential counterexamples to this conjecture — if any happy to bound a non-ribbon disk. In 2022, Dai-Kong-Mallick-Park-Stoffregen showed that unfortunately (?) many of these knots don’t bound a smooth disk into B^4 and thus can’t disprove the conjecture. I’ll show a simple alternate proof that a certain interesting knot (the (2,1)-cable of the figure eight) isn’t slice and discuss remaining open questions. This talk is joint with Paolo Aceto, Nickolas Castro, JungHwan Park, and Andras Stipsicz.

Talk Chair: Cliff Taubes (Harvard Mathematics)

Moderator: Freid Tong (Harvard CMSA)

Raoul Bott (9/24/1923 – 12/20/2005) is known for the Bott periodicity theorem, the Morse–Bott functions, and the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem. For more info, please see the article “Remembering Raoul Bott”  from the American Mathematical Society.


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This message was sent to you via the Geometry List, which announces conferences in geometry and closely related areas to over 1800 mathematicians worldwide. We strongly recommend that announcements are mostly or all in plain text (i.e. without html formatting, which reportedly can create unexpected results on different devices and email systems), with a link provided to a nicely formatted web page.

At http://listserv.utk.edu/archives/geometry.html there are many functions available, including checking the archives since November 2005, changing your e-mail address or preferences, and joining/leaving the list. If you have problems that cannot be resolved at this website, send a message to [log in to unmask]


Before sending an announcement, please carefully read the following. Any announcements that are *not* about conferences (e.g. those about jobs, journals, books, etc.) will be rejected by the moderator without comment. Announcements of individual talks and department seminars will also be rejected; https://mathseminars.org is a good option to announce for such talks. To announce a geometry or closely related conference, send the announcement to [log in to unmask] The moderator cannot edit your message; list members will receive the announcement as an e-mail from you EXACTLY as you submitted it. For example, if your submission starts with "Please post this on the geometry list" then your conference announcement will also begin with that statement. In order to keep down the volume of e-mail, only TWO announcements per conference will be approved by the moderator. The "subject" of your message should include the name of the conference and the number (first or second) of the announcement, e.g. Gauss Memorial Lectures in Geometry: Second Announcement.

You are strongly encouraged to provide essential information such as dates and location near the top of the body of your message, and not require someone to visit your conference link to find it.

Please check that your announcement (especially the website) is correct. Corrections will be approved only in the most critical situations, e.g. if corrected information is not available on the website. After submitting an announcement you may receive a message asking you to confirm your submission. This feature is designed to thwart the hundreds of machine-generated spam that are sent to the list and would otherwise have to be manually blocked by the moderator. If you do not see your announcement within 48 hours, please check the archives to see whether it was actually posted (i.e. you somehow missed seeing the post or are not subscribed with your current email address). If the announcement is not in the archive, search for a confirmation message that you may have missed (from listserv.utk.edu). If none of this solves the mystery, send a message to [log in to unmask]


The Geometry List is sponsored and maintained by the Mathematics Department, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.