Systolic questions in metric and symplectic geometry

Date: 
Thursday, 11 March, 2021 - 16:00 - 17:00
Seminar Type: 
MATH-IMS Joint Pure Mathematics Colloquium Series
Speaker Name: 
Prof. Alberto Abbondandolo
Affiliation: 
Ruhr Universität Bochum
Abstract: 

The prototypical question in metric systolic geometry is to bound the length of a shortest closed geodesic on a closed Riemannian manifold by the volume of the manifold. This question has been extensively studied for non simply connected manifolds, but in the recent years there has been some progress also for simply connected manifolds, on which closed geodesics cannot be found simply by minimizing the length. This progress involves extending systolic questions to Reeb flows, a class of dynamical systems generalising geodesic flows. On the one hand, this extension and the use of symplectic techniques provide some answers to classical questions within metric systolic geometry. On the other hand, new questions arise from the more general setting and relate seemingly distant fields such as the study of rigidity properties of symplectomorphisms and the integral geometry of convex bodies. I will give a non-technical panoramic view of some of these recent developments.