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Minicourse on ``topological combinatorics of partially ordered sets'' I

Special Events

Speaker: Dr. Jonathan Barmak, Universidad de Buenos Aires
Location: 3240 MSB
Start time: Mon, Jul 29 2013, 11:00AM

First talk: Topology and homotopy in partially ordered sets Monday July 29th, 11am-12pm (This should be appropriate for undergraduates) A finite poset P can be regarded as a topological space with finitely many points. The open sets are obtained by choosing an antichain of P and all the points below it. Conversely, any finite space is a poset. Under this identification order preserving maps coincide with continuous maps and the homotopies between maps of finite posets are easy to describe. We will present a simple and beautiful idea of R. Stong from 1966 which allows us to decide whether two finite posets have the same homotopy type.