October 30
Speaker: Alina Vdovina (CUNY, Newcastle)
Title: Buildings, quaternions and fake quadrics
Abstract: We'll present construction of buildings as universal covers of certain complexes. A very interesting case is when the fundamental group of such a complex is arithmetic, since the construction can be carried forward to get new algebraic surfaces, namely fake quadrics. Fake projective planes are already classified following series of works of D. Mumford, G. Prasad, S.-K. Young, D.Cartwright, T.Steger, but the fake quadrics remain mysterious.