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Exotic aspherical 4-manifolds

Geometry/Topology

Speaker: Danny Ruberman, Brandeis University
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Tue, Jan 21 2025, 2:10PM

An aspherical space is one with vanishing higher homotopy groups; under mild assumptions this means that it is determined up to homotopy type by its fundamental group. A famous conjecture of Borel states that closed aspherical manifolds are in fact determined up to homeomorphism by the fundamental group. One could also ask (Borel famously didn’t) whether smooth aspherical manifolds are determined up to diffeomorphism by their fundamental group; this is known to hold in dimensions at most 3 and is false in dimension at least 5. We resolve the remaining case by exhibiting closed smooth aspherical manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic. This is joint with Davis, Hayden, Huang, and Sunukjian.