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.