Colloquium: Tuesday, June 16 2pm. Speaker: Asaf Hadari (University of Hawaii). Title: Homological representations of mapping class groups.
Mapping class groups (and their cousins – automorphism groups of free groups) are some of the most ubiquitous groups in mathematics. Their representation theory is known to be very rich, but still remains very mysterious and many very basic questions remain unanswered. We will describe some of what is known about this representation theory, and discuss a recent result answering one such basic question which has been open for some time: given an infinite order mapping class, is there a representation in which its image has infinite order?
