3:00–4:20 pm Eckhart Hall, Room 202
Colloquium Title: The Fundamental Groups of Random 3-Manifolds and Other Random Objects
Colloquium Abstract: The fundamental group of a 3-manifold varies greatly from one manifold to the next. But what do they typically look like? Dunfield and Thurston formulated a precise version of this question by giving a definition of a random 3-manifold, and made partial progress on it. Building on their work, in joint work with Melanie Matchett Wood we answer this question, at least for the profinite completion of the fundamental group. I will explain how this relates to the classical problem of determining a probability distribution from its moments and discuss how this generalizes to the study of random objects in a wide class of categories.
