| Abstract: |
Surface bundles and Lefschetz fibrations appear in
many diverse branches of mathematics. The rich
structure of these objects illuminates powerful
interactions between areas of complex analysis,
algebraic geometry and symplectic topology.
The colloquium will provide an easy going and pleasant
introduction to surface bundles and will describe an
accessible overview of their natural relationship with
the moduli space. We will emphasize intuition rather
than definition and will illustrate concepts with
simple pictures. Indeed we will see how the edgewise
gluing of triangles, and a little imagination, can
uncover deep connections between the Fibonacci numbers
and the existence of certain 4-manifolds.
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