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VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
PRODID:iCalendar-Ruby
BEGIN:VEVENT
LAST-MODIFIED:20070524T103135
SEQUENCE:0
ORGANIZER:Imperial College London
DTEND:20070525T143000
UID:2008-09-06T22:06:08-0400_650550222@socialweb1
DESCRIPTION:In 1985 Kevin Walker in his study of topology of polygon spaces
  raised an interesting conjecture in the spirit of the well-known question 
 "Can you hear the shape of a drum?" of Marc Kac. Roughly\, Walker's conject
 ure asks if one can recover relative lengths of the bars of a linkage from 
 intrinsic algebraic properties of the cohomology algebra of its configurati
 on space. I will describe results of a recent joint work with J-Cl. Hausman
 n and D. Schuetz in which we prove that the conjecture is true for polygon 
 spaces in R3. We also prove that for planar polygon spaces the conjecture h
 olds is several modified forms:(a) if one takes into account the action of 
 a natural involution on cohomology\, (b) if the cohomology algebra of the i
 nvolution's orbit space is known\, or (c) if the length vector is normal. S
 ome of our results allow the length vector to be non-generic (the correspon
 ding polygon space has singularities).
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SUMMARY:Topology of linkages
DTSTART:20070525T133000
CREATED:20070524T103025
DTSTAMP:20080906T220608
LOCATION:Imperial College London Blackett Laboratory 741
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