Public Lecture

Speaker: Udit Mavinkurve (Western)

"The Fundamental Group(oid) in Discrete Homotopy Theory"

Time: 10:00

Room: MC 107

Discrete homotopy theory is a homotopy theory designed for studying graphs and for detecting combinatorial, rather than topological, ``holes.'' Central to this theory are the discrete homotopy groups, defined using maps out of grids of suitable dimensions. Of these, the discrete fundamental group in particular has found applications in various areas of mathematics, including matroid theory, subspace arrangements, and topological data analysis. In this talk, we introduce the discrete fundamental groupoid, a multi-object generalization of the discrete fundamental group, and use it as a starting point to develop some robust computational techniques. A new notion of covering graphs allows us to extend the existing theory of universal covers to all graphs, and to prove a classification theorem for coverings. We also prove a discrete version of the Seifert--van Kampen theorem, generalizing a previous result of H. Barcelo et al. We then use it to solve the realization problem for the discrete fundamental group through a purely combinatorial construction.

One of the biggest open problems in the subject currently is determining whether the cubical nerve functor provides an equivalence between the discrete homotopy theory of graphs and the classical homotopy theory of spaces. We propose a new line of attack towards this open problem, by breaking it into more tractable problems comparing the homotopy theories of the respective $n$-types, for each nonnegative integer n. We also solve this problem for the first nontrivial case, $n = 1$.

Ph.D. Public Lecture

Speaker: Oussama Hamza (Western)

"Special quotients of Absolute Galois Groups with applications in Number Theory and Pythagorean fields."

Time: 10:00

Room: WSC 248

 This talk aims to present the results obtained by Oussama Hamza, during his PhD studies, and his collaborators: Christian Maire, Jan Minac and Nguyen Duy Tan.

Their work precisely focuses on realisation of pro-p Galois groups over some fields with specific properties for a fixed prime p: especially filtrations and cohomology. Hamza was particularly interested on Number and Pythagorean fields.

This talk will mostly deal with the latest results obtained by Hamza and his collaborators on Formally real Pythagorean fields of finite type (RPF). For this purpose, they introduced a class of pro-2 groups, which is called $\Delta$-RAAGs, and studied some of their filtrations. Using previous work of Minac and Spira, Hamza and his collaborators showed that every pro-2 Absolute Galois group of a RPF is $\Delta$-RAAG. Conversely if a group is $\Delta$-RAAG and a pro-2 Absolute Galois group, then the underlying field is necessarily RPF. This gives us a new criterion to detect Absolute Galois groups.

Finally, we also show that pro-2 Absolute Galois groups of RPF satisfy the Kernel unipotent conjecture jointly introduced by Minac and Tan with the Massey vanishing conjecture, which attracted a lot of interest.