Speaker: 

Tomasz Prytuła

Institution: 

Technical University of Denmark

Time: 

Thursday, February 20, 2020 - 3:00pm

Host: 

Location: 

RH 306

This talk will introduce work in the area of Geometric Group Theory; no prior background in this area will be assumed. The commensurator of a subgroup H of a group G may be seen as a coarse approximation of the normalizer of H. We consider the situation where H is free abelian and G acts properly on a CAT(0) space, that is, a simply connected space of metric non-positive curvature. The structure of the normalizer of H and its action on the space are well understood in this context. However, the commensurator is more mysterious and it contains subtle information about the action which is not seen by the normalizer. For various classes of CAT(0) spaces we obtain structural results about the commensurator and its relation to the normalizer. In this talk, first I will give background on the commensurator and on CAT(0) spaces and groups, and then I will discuss various geometric tools and constructions used in our approach. This is joint work with Jingyin Huang.