Trent Schirmer will speak tomorrow, Thur Jan 29, on: <div><br></div>GK-Trisections of 4-manifolds and the Poincare Conjecture<br><br>Abstract: A GK-trisection of a 4-manifold X is a decomposition of X into three simple handlebodies that intersect in a nice way. Introduced by Gay and Kirby, this construction bears many similarities to Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds, and is amenable to study using 3-manifold techniques, as is well illustrated in a recent paper by Meier and Zupan. In my talk I will describe how GK-trisections provide new approaches to the 4-dimensional smooth Poincare Conjecture. These approaches are essentially the analogues of failed &quot;Heegaard splitting&quot; approaches to the 3-dimensional Poincare Conjecture. However, the fact that the 3d Poincare conjecture is true implies several statements about or related to Heegaard splittings that maybe, just maybe, can somehow be lifted to statements about trisections that imply the 4-d conjecture.