Title: On the Non-Existence of Kervaire Invariant One Manifolds
Speaker: Mike Hill
Speaker Info: University of Virginia
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:
The existence of smooth, Kervaire invariant one manifolds has been an open problem in algebraic topology for well over fifty years. These manifolds were first encountered by Pontryagin in the 1930s, and Kervaire and Milnor tied the existence of such manifolds to an ambiguity in enumerating the number of smooth structures on spheres. In this talk, I will discuss recent work with Hopkins and Ravenel in which we show that in dimensions greater than 126, there are no Kervaire invariant one manifolds, thereby reducing the problem to a single dimension to check.Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2009