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University Park
Altoona

Thursday, December 13, 2007
5:15 pm, 106 McAllister

Bernard Badzioch
SUNY Buffalo

Smooth parametrized Reidemeister torsion - a manifold approach

Dwyer,Weiss and Williams recently gave a construction of smooth parametrized Reidemester torsion which is a secondary invariant of bundles of smooth manifolds. A very appealing aspect of their work is that it uses only machinery of homotopy theory which makes it intuitively simple.The technical side of the construction of torsion is however rather involved.The talk will explain how this construction can be simplified using some results of Waldhausen, and how this new approach can be used to compare the torsion of Dwyer-Weiss-Williams to smooth torsion invariants developed by Bismut-Lott and Igusa-Klein.

We meet weekly on Thursday afternoons, with the third meeting of each month in Altoona. If you are interested in giving a talk in our seminar please contact one of the coordinators for the Fall 2007 semester: Young Choi and Aissa Wade.

 

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