Noncommutative Geometry Seminar

Date: January 24, 2018

Time: 2:00PM - 3:00PM

Location: BLOC 628

Speaker: Nigel Higson, Pennsylvania State University

Title: [Colloquium] Asymptotic geometry and continuous spectrum

Abstract: Early in his career, Hermann Weyl examined and solved the problem of decomposing a function on a half-line as a continuous combination of the eigenfunctions of a Sturm-Liouville operator with asymptotically constant coefficients. Weyl's theorem served as inspiration for Harish-Chandra in his pursuit of the Plancherel formula for semisimple groups, and for this and other reasons it continues to be of interest. I'll try to explain the (noncommutative) geometry behind Weyl's theorem and behind the extensions studied by Harish-Chandra. This is joint work with Tyrone Crisp and Qijun Tan.