Speaker: Maggie Miller (Stanford University)
Title: Obstructing isotopy with an extra dimension
Abstract: In 1982, Livingston showed that several examples of Seifert surfaces that are not isotopic in the 3-sphere become isotopic when pushed into the 4-ball. This is consistent with a common intuition in topology: objects that are somehow similar should become the same when stabilized. We recently constructed families exhibiting that this is not always the case — that is, surfaces in the 3-sphere that remain non-isotopic even when pushed into the 4-ball. This is joint work with Kyle Hayden, Seungwon Kim, JungHwan Park, and Isaac Sundberg.