Geometric invariant theory and spherical buildings

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• Ben Martin, The University of Auckland
• Thursday 24 October 2013, 16:00-17:00
• Watson Building, Lecture Room A.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact David Craven.

A spherical building is a special kind of simplicial complex with a large symmetry group. Spherical buildings were introduced by Jacques Tits; his original motivation was to study algebraic groups, but building theory is now a large and active branch of mathematics in its own right.

Given a reductive algebraic group G – such as a special linear group or a symplectic group – one can construct a spherical building X(G) on which G acts by automorphisms. I will explain some ideas from geometric invariant theory which give rise to interesting subsets of X(G), and discuss applications to Tits’s Centre Conjecture.

This talk is part of the Algebra Seminar series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Algebra Seminar
• School of Mathematics Events
• Watson Building, Lecture Room A

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