Bus:  I just noticed on your math website that you are getting a very nice award of recognition from your department.  My congratulations.

I wanted to call your attention to a talk that will be given here in our topology seminar on Wednesday, February 14 (see attached).  David Rowe has been studying correspondence that had occurred between Kneser and Dehn I guess around 1929.  It was at this time that Kneser had discovered a huge gap in Dehn’s proof of what we call Dehn’s lemma.  David is going to talk about this.  We are getting a great scoop because he has been invited by Cameron Gordon to speak at the UT colloquium in March on this very same topic.

I hope that you and some of your colleagues would be able to attend.  Our seminar usually begins at 3:45, but often when we have an outside speaker, it starts at 4:00, leaving time before it to have tea and cookies.  The actual schedule has not yet been set.  I kind of suggested to David that this might be a little less formal and a little bit free-form in the sense that some people might be there who could say at least a little bit about how and why such a lemma has an impact on the topology of 3-manifolds.  It would be of interest to say something about why the loop theorem is superior to Dehn’s lemma (I do not know these things), which I found out by having a glance at John Hempel’s book.

OK, so let me know what you think about all this.  I certainly hope that you and others can attend.  As usual, we would go out for dinner after the talk.

Lenny