PIRSA:17020036

Video URL

https://pirsa.org/17020036

A reason for representation theorists to play billiards

Fenyes, A. (2017). A reason for representation theorists to play billiards. Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. https://pirsa.org/17020036

Fenyes, Aaron. A reason for representation theorists to play billiards. Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Feb. 06, 2017, https://pirsa.org/17020036 

          @misc{ scivideos_PIRSA:17020036,
            doi = {10.48660/17020036},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/17020036},
            author = {Fenyes, Aaron},
            keywords = {Mathematical physics},
            language = {en},
            title = {A reason for representation theorists to play billiards},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics},
            year = {2017},
            month = {feb},
            note = {PIRSA:17020036 see, \url{https://scivideos.org/pirsa/17020036}}
          }

Aaron Fenyes University of Toronto

Talk numberPIRSA:17020036
DOI10.48660/17020036
Source RepositoryPIRSA
Collection
Talk Type Scientific Series
Subject

Abstract

Representations of the fundamental groups of surfaces appear so often in geometry that it's tempting to see them primarily as geometric structures. In recent years, however, researchers have uncovered beautiful new features of these representations by thinking of them instead as dynamical systems. As an invitation to the dynamical point of view, I'll describe how geometric tools from the study of billiards can be used to build invariants of surface group representations.