Ricardo Andrade: The homotopy dimension of configuration spaces of manifolds
Time: Tue 2015-05-26 13.15 - 15.00
Location: Room 3418, Institutionen för matematik, KTH
Participating: Ricardo Andrade (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster)
The space of configurations of points in a manifold is, of course, homotopy equivalent to a cell complex. Our guiding question will be: What is the smallest dimension of such a complex? The basic theory of configuration spaces readily produces a lower bound for that dimension. This lower bound happens to be sharp in many examples, as can be shown using certain homotopical decompositions of configuration spaces. I intend to illustrate the strong geometric intuition behind these decompositions.