Event Details

Motion groups and moduli spaces via 3-manifold decomposition

This talk is based on joint work with Corey Bregman (2022) and ongoing work with Corey Bregman and Jan Steinebrunner. In work with Bregman, we study embedding spaces of links, inspired by work of Brendle and Hatcher. We obtain a simple description of the motion group of the link, which I will describe for you. Our main tool is a combinatorial gadget built from embedded spheres, which decomposes the link complement into pieces that we may understand more easily. In work in progress with Bregman and Steinebrunner we use this gadget to understand moduli spaces of 3-manifolds in terms of simpler pieces – time permitting I’ll end the talk by giving an overview of the types of results we obtain.