To view Dr. Abbott’s talk, enter her Online chatroom via. Microsoft Teams— it will open at 2:00pm on Friday, October 15th, 2021.

Actions of Baumslag-Solitar groups on hyperbolic spaces

Dr. Carolyn Abbott
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Brandeis University

“A useful tool in understanding a group is to study its
actions on hyperbolic metric spaces, that is, metric spaces
which are negatively curved in some sense, such as the
hyperbolic plane. Many groups admit lots of distinct,
interesting actions on different hyperbolic spaces. In this
talk, I will discuss how one can try to classify all actions of
a given group on hyperbolic spaces, and why it is difficult
to do so in general. I will then describe certain classes
of groups for which this is possible, focusing on solvable
Baumsag-Solitar groups. Surprisingly, this classification
uses techniques from algebraic number theory. If time
permits, I will describe some work-in-progress which
generalizes these methods to larger classes of groups.
Parts of this talk are joint work with Alex Rasmussen, and
parts are joint work with Sahana Balasubramanya and
Alex Rasumussen.”

*Click to view the event flyer.