Topology Seminar: Grigori Avramidi

While an aspherical complex is determined up to homotopy by its fundamental group, there are many geometrically different aspherical manifolds with the same fundamental group. For instance, the punctured torus and the pair of pants look quite different, but both have the same fundamental group F_2. I will discuss constructions of aspherical manifolds for a given fundamental group, talk about the smallest dimension of such a manifold for a given group and describe some geometric invariants that distinguish different aspherical manifolds with the same fundamental group. I will discuss this for right angled Artin groups (joint work with Mike Davis, Boris Okun and Kevin Schreve) and possibly also for duality groups.