Monday 7th of April 2025, 13:30-14:30 in HG03.082
Kevin Zwart
Symmetric Spaces; Lie groups with a monocle and a top hat
Have you ever wondered what the usage of Lie groups is? Or maybe of quotients of a Lie group with a closed subgroup? In this talk, we will explore the wonderful world of symmetric spaces: Riemannian manifolds that exhibit some involution. For example, \(\mathbf{R}^n\), but also the upper half-plane or even more exquisite examples exist like the Grassmanian. In this talk, we will introduce the notion of symmetric spaces, and we will classify a subset of them using... Lie groups? Prerequisites: You know what a manifold is. Knowledge of Riemannian manifolds is nice, but not required, for I will recall the necessary definitions.