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A new way to resolve singularities
Geometry/Topology| Speaker: | Richard Montgomery, UC Santa Cruz |
| Location: | 1147 MSB |
| Start time: | Wed, Mar 5 2008, 4:10PM |
The standard way to resolve plane curve singularities is by blow-up. We recently stumbled on another method of resolution which we call prolongation, with roots in Cartan's work on exterior differential systems. We stumbled on the other method in the process of classifying a family of germs of rank 2 plane fields in n dimensions. In this lecture we would like to review the two methods, relate them, and describe how we arrived at the prolongation method.