Seminar Schedule
May 9, 2005
All Seminars are held in Boyd Graduate Studies Bldg. unless otherwise noted.
Faculty and Graduate Social
3:00p.m., Room 409
Coffee, Cookies, Tea
Special Algebraic Geometry Seminar
3:30p.m., Room 322
Speaker: Hal Schenck, Texas A & M University
Title: Geometry, Algebra, and Topology of Hyperplane Arrangements
Abstract: A hyperplane arrangement A is a collection of hyperplanes
in a fixed vector space V. Arrangements can be studied from many
different viewpoints: geomentry, combinatorics, topology, and algebra
all have roles to play. In the first half of the talk I'll give an overview
of
the field and discuss some of the major open problems. In the second
half of the talk, we'll tackle a hard topic: investigate the fundamental
group of the complement X = V-A. In the process, I'll give an
introduction to the Bernstein-Gelfand-Gelfand correspondence, and
I'll show how to compute examples using the Macaulay2 package.