Mathematics Colloquium, Spring 2004
Special Lecture presented by

Floer homology, periodic orbits and symplectic topology

The search for periodic motions has a long and storied history in classical mechanics. It also plays a prominent role in modern symplectic topology as many surprising rigidity theorems have been proved using the variational principle which underlies the existence of periodic orbits of Hamiltonian flows. One of the most powerful tools for dealing with this variational principle is the homology theory of Floer. In this talk, I will describe some recent applications of Floer theory which yield some new answers to old problems in classical mechanics and allow one to compute symplectic invariants in new cases.

Thursday, January 29, 2004, 245 Altgeld Hall, 4:00 p.m.