Mathematics Colloquium

Thursday, October 10, 1996, 4:00pm

102 Bradley Hall

Professor Peter Petersen

University of California at Los Angeles

speaks on

What is Curvature?

Abstract.I will explain how various curvatures are defined and come up naturally in many different contexts: Angle excess in triangles, The Bochner technique, Conjugate points, holonomy and more. In each case I'll attempt to explain how various curvature hypotheses lead to metric or topological constraints. Corresponding to the above topics we have: The Gauss-Bonnet theorem, bounds for Betti numbers, Myer's diameter bound, and the classification of manifolds with non-negative curvature operator.

Tea. High tea will be served at 3:30pm in the Lounge.
Emmy's. Certain refreshments will be available at Emmy's after the talk.
Host. Shunhui Zhu is the host. Anybody who is interested in having dinner with the speaker should contact Shunhui at 646-3678.