In his inaugural lecture, Professor Sergei Merkulov will start with a very naive picture of a straight line drawn in a plane, and show how an attempt to deform that naive picture leads us towards that very mysterious object called the Grothendieck-Teichmueller group.

About the topic

Prof. Merkulov’s research interests lie at the crossroad of several branches of pure mathematics and mathematical physics including geometry, algebra, analysis, number theory and quantum theory. It requires a synergetic effort to solve the longstanding mystery of the Grothendieck-Teichmueller group, to explain its appearance in seemingly unrelated areas of pure mathematics with important consequences for those areas. The Grothendieck-Teichmueller theory began with Alexander Grothendieck’s famous “Esquisse d’un programme” (1981), and a few years later it was independently rediscovered by Vladimir Drinfeld (1989) who introduced the Grothendieck-Teichmueller group (GT) while working on a seemingly unrelated problem of braided quasi-Hopf algebras and their universal automorphisms. The profinite version of GT contains the Galois group of rational numbers, the Holy Grail of modern mathematics.

The group GT played a central role in solving of many seemingly unrelated problems. Drinfeld pioneered applications of GT in the number theory, Etingof and Kazhdan (1995) used GT to solve the Drinfeld’s quantisation conjecture for Lie bialgebras, while Alekseev and Torossian (2010) applied it to solve the famous Kashiwara-Vergne problem in the Lie theory. Kontsevich’s and Tamarkin’s formality theory (1997-1998) unraveled the role of the group GT in Deformation Quantisation, and recent results of Willwacher (2010-) establish a link between the group GRT and graph complexes.

The Grothendieck-Teichmueller group unifies different areas in mathematics. Every time this group appears in a mathematical theory, there is a breakthrough in that theory. In his talk, Prof. Merkulov will start with a very naive picture of a straight line drawn in a plane, and show how an attempt to deform that naive picture leads us towards that mysterious object called the Grothendieck-Teichmueller group.

About the speaker

Prof. Sergei Merkulov was born and educated in Moscow. He was working at the USSR Academy of Science until 1992. After the breakdown of the Soviet Union, he moved to work first to Denmark (1993) and then to the UK (1994). In 1999, he became a full professor in mathematics at the University of Glasgow. In 2002, he moved to work to Sweden at the Stockholm University and he was awarded in 2003 the Goran Gustafsson prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. During the year 2012-2013 he was the director of the Stockholm Mathematical Center. Since 2013, he is working at the Mathematics Research Unit of the University of Luxembourg.

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Inaugural lecture is on Thursday, 25 February 2016 at 18:00 on Campus Kirchberg, room C02.

Introduction by Prof. Dr. Paul Heuschling, Dean of the Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication.
A reception will take place after the inaugural lecture.