March 27-29, 2006 -- 2:10 p.m.
All Lectures at the Fields Institute, Room 230

Yair Minsky (Yale)

Curve complexes, surfaces and 3-manifolds

The curve complex of a surface is a simplicial complex whose structure encodes the disjointness relation among essentially embedded circles. It is elementary to define but difficult to analyze, and has recently played a central role in the solution of problems in hyperbolic geometry, topology of 3-manifolds, and mapping class groups of surfaces. I will survey these developments and try to give a feeling for the kind of tools that they involve, and the kind of open problems which remain.

The Fields Institute Coxeter Lecture Series (CLS) brings a leading mathematician to the Institute to give a series of three lectures in the field of the current thematic program. The first talk is an overview for a general mathematical audience, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. The other two talks are chosen, in collaboration with the organizers of the thematic program, to target specialists in the field.