Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

There has been a recent interest in studying surfaces of infinite type, i.e. surfaces with infinitely-generated fundamental groups. In this talk, we will focus on their mapping class groups, often called big mapping class groups. In contrast to the finite-type case, there are many open questions regarding the basic algebraic and topological properties of big mapping class groups. I will discuss several such questions and provide some answers. In particular, I will discuss automorphism groups of mapping class groups as well as relations between topological invariants of a surface and algebraic invariants of its mapping class group. The results in the talk are based on recent joint work with Priyam Patel and ongoing joint work with Javier Aramayona and Priyam Patel.