Dear friends:

One of our postodctoral visiting assistant professors Jonathan Johnson will favor us with the colloquium tomorrow at 3:30 PM in MSCS 514 (fifth floor). His title is Keeping Things in Order and the abstract is below.

After that there are two colloquia remaining this semester: Friday Nov. 18, Kazuo Yamazaki, OSU Ph.D. and Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University. Title: Singular stochastic PDE's and non-uniqueness in mathematical physics and fluid mechanics

Friday Dec. 2, Weizhang Huang, University of Kansas. Title: The MMPDE moving mesh method and applications

Sincerely, David Wright

Keeping Things in Order, Jonathan Johnson

Abstract: In the past couple of decades, group orderability has played a surprising role in the study of 3-manifolds. In this talk, we will focus on two key questions. When can the elements of a group be bi-ordered; that is, when is there a total ordering of a group’s elements invariant under group multiplication? Second, when does an automorphism of a group preserve a bi-ordering of the group? In particular, we will explore these questions for the fundamental groups of exteriors of links in the 3-sphere.