TopComb back in session 3/10/11

[Anton Dochtermann]

Dear all,
After a long hiatus, the Topological Combinatorics seminar will meet
again THIS THURSDAY March 10, 2011 at 10AM in Evans 939. Alexander
Berglund, a visitor at Stanford, will speak about his work on moment
angle complexes and DJ spaces (title and abstract below).

Next week we will switch gears and start a new topic for the Spring
session. We are still open to suggestions but the tentative plan is
to study combinatorial models of vector bundles and classifying
spaces, incorporating notions of oriented matroid bundles and related
objects introduced by MacPherson and others. I will post some papers
on the website as we decide on more detailed topics. We'll plan to go
to lunch on Thursday around 12:30pm (after Lauren's class) so please
join us to continue the discussion.

The updated (but still rather sparse) website for the seminar can be
found here:
http://math.stanford.edu/~anton/seminar2011.html

See you Thursday!
best,
anton (& alex)

Alexander's talk:
Homotopy invariants of Davis-Januszkiewicz spaces and moment-angle
complexes

I will describe a combinatorial model for calculating the rational
homotopy groups, with Whitehead products, of Davis-Januszkiewicz
spaces and moment-angle complexes. I will also give an explicit
generating function for the Betti numbers of the based loop spaces of
these spaces, with coefficients in any field.