"Geometry and Analysis on Groups" Research Seminar



Title: Kodaira fibrations and mapping class groups.
Speaker: Claudio Llosa Isenrich (Vienna)
Abstract: Kodaira fibrations are topological surface-by-surface bundles with infinite monodromy which admit a complex structure. The first examples of Kodaira fibrations were constructed by Kodaira and by Atiyah in the 1960s. Since then the geometric and group theoretical properties of Kodaira fibrations have attracted much attention. In this talk we will explain how one can use Kodaira fibrations to construct a virtual embedding of the mapping class group of a once punctured surface of any genus into the mapping class group of a closed surfaces of higher genus. The homomorphisms we construct have the property that their images are irreducible. This provides new insights into the nature of homomorphisms between mapping class groups and thus into the rigidity properties of mapping class groups. This is joint work with Pierre Py.