Special Colloquium
Aaron Brown
University of Chicago
Lattice actions on manifolds and recent progress in the Zimmer program
Abstract: The Zimmer Program is a collection of conjectures and questions regarding actions of lattices in higher-rank simple Lie groups on compact manifolds. For instance, one expects all non-trivial actions to be constructed from algebraic examples. In particular, Zimmer’s conjecture asserts that all actions on manifolds whose dimension is below the dimension of possible algebraic examples are finite.
I will present some background, examples, and evidence for Zimmer's conjecture and other conjectures
in the Zimmer program. I will then discuss two of my results that fall within the Zimmer program:
(1) a solution to Zimmer’s conjecture for actions of cocompact lattices in SL(n,R);
(2) global rigidity of certain actions on tori and nilmanifolds.
Tuesday November 22, 2016 at 3:00 PM in SEO 636