Welcome to the website for the Fall 2026 iteration of the MIT Geometry & Topology Seminar, organized by Joye Chen and Ayodeji Lindblad. The seminar will meet on Mondays from 3:30PM - 4:30PM in room 449 of MIT Building 2.
September 14. Bob Gompf - The universal $\mathbb{R}^4$ and applications.
We will discuss the universal $\mathbb{R}^4$ and universal smoothings more generally. This work was inspired by a 1986 paper of Freedman and Taylor but extends well beyond it. Simplifications of the main proof lead to a simpler definition and stronger results. One application is a 4-manifold for which the diffeomorphism types of its smoothings are as hard to classify as countable graphs (allowing infinite valence) up to graph isomorphism (joint with A. Panagiotopoulos). Another is to determine the compactly supported mapping class groups of a large class of smooth, open 4-manifolds (joint with P. Orson and A. Ray).
September 21. Kyle Hayden.
September 28. Hokuto Konno.
October 5. Jiajun Yan.
October 12. No speaker - Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
October 19. Dave Gabai.
October 26. Susan Hermiller.
November 2. Gheehyun Nahm.
November 9. Richard Bamler.
November 16. No speaker - Yet.
November 23. No speaker - Thanksgiving week.
November 30. Mira Wattal.
December 7. Chris Scaduto.
December 14. Dave Auckly.
Other seminars & past years: