This seminar meets 4-5pm (CDT/CST) on Fridays in person in HBH 427.  The abstracts are below the titles.

Abstracts:

Connor Sell: Compact flat manifolds with non-vanishing Stiefel-Whitney classes

In this talk, we'll discuss a construction of compact flat (2n+1)- manifolds M such that the Stiefel-Whitney classes w_2j(M) are non-vanishing for all 2j <= n.  This result stands in contrast to the  fact that the Stiefel-Whitney numbers of flat manifolds vanish, and has an application to hyperbolic manifolds.

Brian Udall:  Thompson's Group F

Thompsons group F is a well studied group which has shown up

in a variety of contexts since Thompson originally discovered it and

its parent groups in the 60's. In this talk, we'll be focusing on a

couple of concrete geometric representations of the group, and see how

these different ways of viewing the group can provide different kinds

of information about it. Specifically, we will discuss its standard

presentations and facts about its commutator subgroup, as well as some

of the history of F and amenability.

*Topology Seminar

Abstracts:

Connor Sell - A hyperbolic 5-manifold that fibers over S^1.

The property of fibering over S^1 plays an important role in the study of hyperbolic 3-manifolds.  However, it was unknown until recently whether any hyperbolic manifolds in other dimensions had this property.  In this talk, I will discuss a paper by Italiano-Martelli-Migliorini which constructs a hyperbolic 5-manifold that fibers over S^1.