Laura Wakelin (UT Austin) : Dehn surgery functions are never injective.

Please note this event occurred in the past.
March 13, 2026 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm ET
Seminars,
5 College Geometry and Topology Seminar
Laura Wakelin Laura Wakelin
LGRT 1681

Dehn surgery functions are never injective.

Abstract: For any fixed rational number p/q, Dehn surgery gives a map from the set of knots in the 3-sphere to the set of closed orientable 3-manifolds. In 1978, Gordon conjectured that these maps are never injective. I will briefly discuss some results which demonstrate non-injectivity for some special cases of p/q, before going on to present joint work with Kyle Hayden and Lisa Piccirillo in which we prove the conjecture using rational RBG links and the zeroth HOMFLYPT polynomial.