EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: Smith theory and geometric representation theory (Remote Speaker)
Speaker: Geordie Williamson
Speaker Info: University of Sydney
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:

In the 1930s, Smith pointed out that Z/p-actions on spheres have fixed points which look like spheres, at least in mod p cohomology. His observation was one of the first examples of a fixed point theorem for group actions, and Borel and others generalized this in the 1960s and 70s into a powerful web of techniques for computations in cohomology and K-theory. Recently, there has been a return to Smith's ideas in modular representation theory, largely thanks to the work of David Treumann. I will describe recent work of with Simon Riche where we deduce character formulae for reductive groups using a variant of Smith-Treumann theory.