Department Colloquium

Location: RI 209

Speaker: Yang Hu, University of Regina

Title:  Counting vector bundles with calculus

Abstract:

Vector bundles are fundamental objects appearing naturally in many areas of mathematics. A basic but surprisingly subtle questions is — over a fixed manifold, how many vector bundles are there up to isomorphism? While this problem is well understood in the stable setting, it becomes much more complicated in the unstable range. In this talk, I will explain how functor calculus — a modern tool from algebraic topology — can be used to shed new light on this classical question.