EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: Real manifolds with good complexifications
Speaker: Burt Totaro
Speaker Info: University of Chicago
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:

We try to find which closed manifolds occur as the space of real points U(R) of an affine algebraic variety such that U(R) is homotopy equivalent to U(C). The motivation is that this does happen in a few beautiful cases; for example, the sphere S^n is homotopy equivalent to the complex affine variety {x_0^2+ ... + x_n^2 = 1}. There is a surprisingly precise conjecture about which manifolds have such a complexification, which we can support with some examples and theorems.