Bounded cohomology via partial differential equations

Speaker: Andreas Ott

Abstract: By the van Est isomorphism, continuous cohomology of simple Lie groups vanishes in degree greater than the dimension of the associated symmetric space.  Monod conjectured that a similar vanishing theorem should hold for continuous bounded cohomology.  In this talk, we will present a new technique that employs partial differential equations in order to explicitly construct primitives in the continuous bounded cohomology of Lie groups.  As an application, we prove Monod's conjecture for SL(2,R) in degree four and discuss perturbations of the Spence-Abel functional equation for the dilogarithm function.  This is joint work with Tobias Hartnick.