Branched covers II

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, October 20, 2017 - 1:55pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Georgia Tech
Organizer
John Etnyre

Please Note: Note this talk is only 1 hour (to allow for the GT MAP seminar at 3.

In this series of talks I will introduce branched coverings of manifolds and sketch proofs of most the known results in low dimensions (such as every 3 manifold is a 3-fold branched cover over a knot in the 3-sphere and the existence of universal knots). This week we will continue studying branched covers of surfaces. Among other things we should be able to see how to use branched covers to see some relations in the mapping class group of surfaces.