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MIMS, School of Mathematics, Alan Turing Building, University of Manchester.

Supported by the London Mathematical Society and MIMS.

By popular demand, the meeting included an afternoon with the mod 2 Steenrod Algebra, which was aimed at those who knew little about the subject, but would enjoy an introduction and a progress report from two experts who were busy writing a definitive new treatment. They welcomed questions about the book, as well as the mathematics!

Date

23 May 2014

Speakers

Tara Holm (Cornell University, visiting Oxford)
The topology of toric origami manifolds

A folded symplectic form on a manifold is a closed 2-form with the mildest possible degeneracy along a hypersurface. A special class of folded symplectic manifolds are the origami manifolds. In the classical case, toric symplectic manifolds can classified by their moment polytope, and their topology (equivariant cohomology) can be read directly from the polytope.

In this talk we examine the toric origami case: we will recall how toric origami manifolds can also be classified by their combinatorial moment data, and present some theorems, almost-theorems, and conjectures about the topology of toric origami manifolds.

Reg Wood (Manchester)
Introduction to the Steenrod algbera one

I shall provide an introduction to the Steenrod squares Sqk as operations on polynomials over F2, as well as to the hit problem and to the conjugate squaring operations Xqk.

Grant Walker (Manchester)
Introduction to the Steenrod algebra two

I will talk about the mod 2 Steenrod algebra as defined by generators Sqk and the Adem relations, and relate this to the setup described in talk one. I will discuss some of the internal structure, such as admissible, Milnor and maybe some other bases, conjugation, exchanging Sqk and Xqk, and maybe certain subalgebras.

Further information

The meeting was jointly supported by the London Mathematical Society and MIMS.