Topics in analytic group theory (Winter semester 2023/24)
Lecturer
Tim de Laat
Target audience
Master students and PhD students.
Lectures
Mondays 10:15 - 12:00 in SRZ 205
Wednesdays 08:30 - 10:00 in SRZ 203
(Handwritten) lecture notes can be found in Learnweb
Course description
- Background on locally compact groups, Haar measure, Lie groups, finitely generated groups
- Lattices in Lie groups, cocompactness, arithmeticity
- Amenability and the Haagerup property
- Property (T) and affine actions on Banach spaces
- Expander graphs
The topics covered partly depend on the interests of the audience. There may be some overlap with topics covered in courses on geometric group theory, but the treatment of these topics will be from an analytic rather than a geometric perspective (which may be particularly interesting if you took a course in geometric group theory).
Prerequisites
Functional analysis, point-set topology, basic group theory and basic geometry. (Specific preliminaries will be recalled if necessary.)