Abstract

This talk presents joint work with Kee Lam of UBC and Nancy Cardim, Maria Herminia de Mello, and Mario Olivero da Silva in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Given the total space of any orthogonal sphere bundle over a sphere, we determine its stable span and span.

Details

2009 Niven Lecture:

Abstract: We will discuss the recent developments in the asymptotic theory of finite groups and their applications to theoretical computer science, number theory and topology.

Speaker's Biography: Efim Zelmanov is one of the world's leading algebraists. He is best known for his ground breaking work in Jordan algebras, Lie algebras and combinatorial group theory. In 1994 he was awarded a Field's medal for his solution of the restricted Burnside problem.

About the Niven Lectures: Ivan Niven was a famous number theorist and expositor; his textbooks won numerous awards, have been translated into many languages and are widely used to this day. Niven was born in Vancouver in 1915, earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at UBC in 1934 and 1936 and his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1938. He was a faculty member at the University of Oregon since 1947 until his retirement in 1982. The annual Niven lecture series, held at UBC since 2005, is funded in part through a generous bequest from Ivan and Betty Niven to the UBC Mathematics Department.