Pure Maths Colloquium: Jeffrey Giansiracusa
This talk is part of the Pure Maths Colloquium at the University of St Andrews. Check out our upcoming talks at https://theran.lt/pure-colloquium/.
| Where: | MI Theatre C |
| When: | Apr 6 2023 @ 16.00 | Video: | Not recorded |
| Speaker: | Jeffrey Giansiracusa Durham University |
| Title: | An E-infinity structure on the matroid Grassmannian |
The matroid Grassmannian is the space of oriented matroids. 30 years ago MacPherson showed us that understanding the homotopy type of this space can have significant implications in manifold topology. In some easy cases, the matroid Grassmannian is homotopy equivalent to the ordinary real Grassmannian, but in most cases we have no idea whether or not they are equivalent. This is known as MacPherson’s conjecture. I’ll show that one of the important homotopical structures of the ordinary Grassmannians has an analogue on the matroid Grassmannian, namely the direct sum monoidal product that is commutative up to all higher homotopies.