Colloquium: The Differential Geometry of Spinor Fields

Abstract: The concept of spinor fields was introduced in the early 20th century by the renowned geometer Elie Cartan and has since been used in diverse areas such as condensed matter theory, mathematical gauge theory, and the index theory of Fredholm operators to name a few. As ubiquitous as they are in mathematics today, they have been known to be difficult to visualize and understand geometrically. In this talk we will present an approach to spinors which uses a mixture of real, complex, and quaternion multi-vectors along with an explicit view of their differential geometry along a surface.  

Host: Wanlin Li

Reception to follow at Cupples I, Room 200 (Lounge) from 2:00 - 3:00 pm.