Tyrone Ghaswala (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Title: Promoting circular-orderability to left-orderability.

Abstract:

Circularly-orderable and left-orderable groups play an important, and sometimes surprising role in low-dimensional topology. Motivated by these connections, I will present new necessary and sufficient conditions for a circularly-orderable group to be left-orderable, and introduce the obstruction spectrum of a circularly-orderable group. This raises a plethora of intriguing questions, especially when the group is the fundamental group of a manifold. Time permitting, I will talk about how this work leads to new progress in answering the question of when the direct product of two circularly-orderable groups is circularly-orderable.

This is joint work with Jason Bell and Adam Clay.