Montreal Geometric & Combinatorial Group Theory Seminar
Speaker: Chris Hruska (U Chicago)
Title: “Relative hyperbolicity and spaces with
isolated flats”
Date: 3:30pm Wednesday,
November 20.
Room: 920 Burnside
Abstract: Negatively curved spaces have many
interesting properties that do not hold in general for nonpositively curved
spaces. However, these results can
often be extended to the class of nonpositively curved spaces whose flat
Eulidean subspaces are “isolated”.
A key tool used in
such extensions is a Relatively Thin Triangle Property which holds in many
(perhaps all) nonpositively curved spaces with isolated flats. This property
generalizes the fact that triangles in a negatively curved space are delta-thin
in the sense that any side is contained in a delta-neighborhood of the union of
the other two sides.
I will discuss this
Relatively Thin Triangle Property and its relation to the group theoretic
notion of relative hyperbolicity studied by Farb and Bowditch.