Group Actions Seminar: Cleary -- The bizarre world of Thompson’s groups

The next Group Actions seminar will be on Thursday 2 May, at the University of Sydney.
Details are below.  Unusually, there will be only one Group Actions speaker.  

We will join with the GTA seminar for lunch, meeting at 1pm outside Level 2 of Carslaw.

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Date: Thursday 2 May 

Time: 3pm 

Location: Carslaw 356, University of Sydney 

Speaker: Sean Cleary (City College of New York) 

Title: The bizarre world of Thompson’s groups 

Abstract: In the early 1960’s Richard J.  Thompson discovered a fascinating family of
infinite groups in connection with his work in logic.  These groups have reappeared in a
wide variety of settings, including homotopy theory, measure theory of discrete groups,
non-associative algebras, dynamical systems and geometric group theory.  Thompson’s
group F is the simplest known example of a variety of unusual group-theoretic phenomena
and has been the subject of a great deal of study.  I will describe these groups from
several different perspectives and discuss some of their remarkable properties,
particularly some unusual aspects of the geometry of their standard Cayley graphs and
the first known non-trivial self quasi-isometries which arise as commensurations of F.  

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