The 2018-19 Serge Lang Undergraduate Lecture will be given on Thursday, April 18, 2019 at 4:10PM in room 60 Evans Hall on the Berkeley campus. Our lecturer this year is Helene Barcelo.
MUSA and the Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, present
The 2018-19 Serge Lang Undergraduate Lecture
Helene Barcelo
MSRI
Distinguishing shapes via topology
Abstract: Topologists will say that a coffee cup is like a donut. What do they mean? Homotopy and Homology are invariants created to distinguish basic geometric structures. In this talk I will briefly talk about the history of such invariants and describe new ones that are also applicable to discrete structures like graphs.