A construction of Steenrod squares and their quantum counterparts
Geometry and Topology Seminar
8th December 2020, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Zoom seminar, if interested, please email one of the organisers to gain access to the Zoom link
The Steenrod squares are cohomological operations that exist for any topological space. Depending on one's mathematical background, the construction of the Steenrod square that one first encounters may seem completely non-obvious. In this talk, I will give one way to construct the Steenrod squares for a closed smooth manifold (perhaps via Morse theory), which might appeal to those with less familiarity with homological algebra. Then, I will discuss the notion of quantum cohomology for almost complex manifolds and demonstrate that there is a natural way to extend this construction of the Steenrod squares to quantum cohomology.
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