[Binghamton Geometry/Topology Seminar] geometry topology seminar

[Ross Geoghegan]

                   BINGHAMTON GEOMETRY/TOPOLOGY SEMINAR


   Date: Thursday, November 4, 2004  

   Time:  2.50 pm

   Place: Library North 2205 followed by coffee/tea in the Anderson
          Reading Room.

   Speaker: Stratos Prassidis (Canisius College) 

   Title: Metric Roundness in Analysis and Topology

Abstract: Per Enflo introduced roundness as an invariant for classifying
topological linear spaces up to uniform homeomorphism. In the first
part of the talk we will describe how this invariant was used and
extend Enflo's ideas to compare, up to uniform homeomorphism, normed
and quasi-normed spaces. In the second part, we view roundness as a
geometric invariant of metric spaces. It turns out that the properties
of metric spaces of non-trivial roundness are very similar to the ones
of non-positively curved spaces. In the last part of the talk we compute
the roundness of certain Cayley graphs and connect roundness to algebraic
properties of groups.


NOTE:  The seminar has a webpage where the semester's program is listed:

http://math.binghamton.edu/MATH/dept/topsem/index.html

It can also be linked from the Department's Home Page.