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Back to Departmental Colloquium: Spring 2024

Departmental Colloquium


Date: Thursday, Mar 14, 2024

Time: 4:00PM - 5:00PM

Location: JWB 335


Carolyn Abbott

Brandeis University

Title

Boundaries, boundaries, and more boundaries

Abstract

It is possible to learn a lot about a group by studying how it acts on various metric spaces. One particularly interesting (and ubiquitous) class of groups are those that act nicely on negatively curved spaces, called hyperbolic groups. Since their introduction by Gromov in the 1980s, hyperbolic groups and their generalizations have played a central role in geometric group theory. One fruitful tool for studying such groups is their boundary at infinity. In this talk, I’ll discuss two generalizations of hyperbolic groups, relatively hyperbolic groups and hierarchically hyperbolic groups, and describe boundaries of each. I’ll describe various relationships between these boundaries, and explain how the hierarchically hyperbolic boundary characterizes relative hyperbolicity among hierarchically hyperbolic groups. This is joint work with Jason Behrstock and Jacob Russell.

Geometric Group Theory AWM Speaker Series

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