JGS Friday April 22nd 11 am

[Rafael Torres]

 Date/time/place Friday April 22nd/11 am/Room 136

Title: The h-cobordism theorem

Speaker: Younes Benyahia (SISSA)

Abstract:In 1960, and according to the myth, while relaxing on the beaches of Rio, Smale proved (in a way fitting the beauty of those beaches) the Poincaré Conjecture for dimensions higher than or equal to 5 as a corollary of another result: The h-Cobordism Theorem, which translates some homotopy conditions on a cobordism to it being smoothly trivial.  The main ingredient is handle decompositions (think of a CW decomposition where lower dimensional cells are thickened to fit the manifold’s dimension), which, in higher dimensions, can be related nicely to homology.


  In this talk (that should be accessible to everyone) we will introduce these notions and give the main ideas of the proof.


Note: The structure of the seminar will be 40 mins + 5 mins break + 40 mins.