Noncommutative Geometry Seminar

Date: March 3, 2015

Time: 4:00PM - 5:00PM

Location: BLOC 220

Speaker: Weiping Zhang, Chern Institute of Mathematics

Title: An introduction to analytic torsion (Colloquium)

Abstract: Ray and Singer introduced analytic torsion in 1971 as an analytic analogue of the Reidemeister torsion, a classical topological invariant, and conjectured that the analytic torsion equals to the Reidemeister torsion. This conjecture was proved independently by Cheeger and Mueller around 1978. In this talk we will summarize developments surrounding this important analytic invariant, including a recent joint work with Jean-Michel Bismut and Xiaonan Ma on the asymptotics of the analytic torsion.