Open Neighborhood Seminar: The flexibility of caustics and its applications
SEMINARS, OPEN NEIGHBORHOOD
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April 10, 2024 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Science Center 507
Address:
1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
Speaker:
Dani Álvarez-Gavela - MIT
I will begin by reviewing the story of the flexibility of singularities of smooth mappings, from the immersion theory of Smale-Hirsch to the Igusa-Lurie contractibility of the space of framed functions. I will then explain similar flexibility results for caustics: the singularities of wavefronts, and discuss its applications to symplectic and contact topology, notably to the arborealization program for skeleta of Weinstein manifolds.
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https://people.math.harvard.edu/~gammage/ons/