Date: Sept 11th & Oct 2nd 2012

Speaker: Timothy Susse (GC)

Title: Introduction to Non-positive Curvature

Abstract: Aspects of negative and non-positive curvature have been the focus of much research, especially in recent years. We will present a combinatorial condition which captures curvature upper bounds for general metric spaces and proceed to prove some basic results. Our eventual goal will be to address metric cube complexes and give a simple, combinatorial condition to determine when they are non-positively curved.