Departmental Colloquium
Alex Eskin
University of Chicago
Quasi-isometries and rigidity of solvable groups
Abstract: The notion of quasi-isometry is the natural equivalence relation if
one views groups as metric spaces. We prove that any group
quasi-isometric to the three dimenionsional solvable Lie group Sol is
virtually a lattice in Sol. Our results extend to some other classes
of groups and spaces, and are contributions to Gromov's program for
classifying finitely generated groups up to quasi-isometry [Gr2].
We introduce a new technique for studying quasi-isometries, which we
refer to as "coarse differentiation". This is joint work with David
Fisher and Kevin Whyte.
Friday October 13, 2006 at 3:00 PM in SEO 636