| GEOMETRY/DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS | |
| Topic: | A Reidemeister-Singer Conjecture for Surface Diagrams |
| Speaker: | Jonathan Williams |
| Affiliation: | University of California, Berkeley |
| Date: | Friday, December 3 |
| Time/Room: | 4:00pm - 5:00pm/S-101 |
There is a way to specify any smooth, closed oriented four-manifold using a surface decorated with simple closed curves, something I call a surface diagram. In this talk I will describe three moves on these objects, two of which are reminiscent of Heegaard diagrams for three-manifolds. These may form part of a uniqueness theorem for such diagrams that is likely to be useful for understanding Floer theories for non-symplectic four-manifolds.