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Morse theory, handle decompositions, and homology

Student-Run Geometry/Topology Seminar

Speaker: Rohit Thomas, UC Davis
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Tue, Oct 6 2009, 12:10PM

Morse theory is a tool for connecting analytical information (the critical points of a manifold) to topological information (a handle decomposition of the manifold) and algebro-topological information (the homology groups of the manifold). This talk will consist of an introduction to Morse theory, followed by an introduction to handle decompositions and homology and a description of how these can be obtained from Morse-theoretic information. Finally, I will describe how these constructions generalize to equivariant descriptions of manifolds with reflection symmetry.