SMS scnews item created by Zhou Zhang at Wed 12 Mar 2014 1708
Type: Seminar
Modified: Mon 17 Mar 2014 1046; Mon 17 Mar 2014 1303; Mon 17 Mar 2014 1349; Mon 17 Mar 2014 1350
Distribution: World
Expiry: 7 Apr 2014
Calendar1: 18 Mar 2014 1200-1300
CalLoc1: Carslaw 535A
Auth: zhangou@como.maths.usyd.edu.au

# GTA Seminar: Tillmann -- Normal Surfaces in 3-Manifolds: Algorithms, Experiments and Questions Discrete Uniformization Theorem for Polyhedral Surfaces

The original talk by Professor Feng Luo is cancelled due to visa reason.
Sorry for any inconvenience.

However, we have the following talk offered by Stephan Tillmann. It is
supposed to warm up people for the incoming workshop in Week 5.

Time: Tuesday, March 18, 12NOON--1PM.

Room: Carslaw 535A.

Title: Normal Surfaces in 3-Manifolds: Algorithms, Experiments and Questions

ABSTRACT: the theory of normal surfaces, introduced by Kneser in the 1920s
and further developed by Haken in the 1960s plays a crucial role in 3-manifold
topology. Normal surfaces allow topological problems to be translated into
algebraic problems or linear programs, and they are the key to many important
advances over the last $50$ years, including the solution of the unknot
recognition problem by Haken, the 3-sphere recognition problem by Rubinstein
and Thompson and the homeomorphism problem by Haken, Hemion and Matveev.

In this talk, I will summarise Haken’s blueprint for algorithmic 3-manifold
topology, discuss the "difficulty" of the computational problems from a
theoretical and experimental perspective and state some open questions and
challenges.

**********************************************************************

Speaker: Prof. Feng Luo (Rutgers University)

http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~fluo/

Time: Tuesday, March 18, 12NOON--1PM.

Room: Carslaw 535A.

Lunch: seminar lunch is right after the talk at Law Annex Cafe,
with reservation at 1:10PM.

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Title: A Discrete Uniformization Theorem for Polyhedral Surfaces

ABSTRACT: we introduce a discrete conformality for polyhedral
metrics on surfaces. It is shown that each polyhedral metric
on a surface is discrete conformal to a constant curvature
polyhedral metric which is unique up to scaling. Furthermore,
the constant curvature metric can be found by a finite
dimensional variational principle. This is a joint work with
David Gu, Jian Sun and Tianqi Wu.

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Seminar website:

http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/SemConf/Geometry/


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