Department lecture by Nicolas Monod

A colloquium style lecture. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Speaker: Nicolas Monod, EPFL

Titel: Safe spaces in geometry and analysis

Abstract: In the Wild West of geometry and groups, some familiar objects feel like home: Euclidean spaces, hyperbolic geometry, and more generally all the geometries described by semisimple Lie groups or similar matrix groups over local fields.

Harmonic analysis and operator algebras have their own wild oceans, but again with a small safe haven: the "Type I", home of the commutative world, compact groups, generalizations of Fourier analysis. In a precise sense, objects that can be "described".

I will present a connection between these two worlds and show how it leads to previously unexpected classification results.