Fridays in Carslaw 830 Daryl Cooper (UC Santa Barbara) is visiting the University of Sydney this semester as part of the SMRI International Visitor Program. He has agreed to give a lecture course of five 2-hour blocks on projective structures on manifolds, starting with an introductory survey and concluding with recent research. After the first lecture on Friday 13 September, 11am-1pm, we will go to lunch with the speaker; please let me know if you would like to join us. (There is no Algebra Seminar on that day.) Anthony -------------------- Title: Deformations of Properly Convex Real Projective Structures. Plan: First 3 introductory lectures will be an introduction and survey. The tools include Lie groups, group theory, geometry, a bit of topology and a Hessian metric. The last two lectures will cover a new proof of the fact that the space of properly convex real projective structures on a closed n-manifold M, embeds, by taking holonomy, into the quotient of the representation variety by conjugation Hom(pi_1M,PGL(n+1,R))/conjugacy. If there is time we might discuss ongoing work with Stephan Tillmann of an extension to the non-compact case. Fridays in Carslaw 830 13/09 1100-1300 20/09 1000-1200 27/09 1000-1200 18/10 1000-1200 25/10 1000-1200