Dear All, The Geometry-Topology-Analysis Seminar in Semester 2 takes place on Wednesdays from 11:00-12:00. Our first talk is this week: Wednesday, 30 July, 11:00-12:00 in Carslaw 535A Speaker: Joseph Maher (CUNY Staten Island) Title: The Casson invariants of random Heegaard splittings Abstract: The mapping class group element resulting from a finite length random walk on the mapping class group may be used as the gluing map for a Heegaard splitting, and the resulting 3-manifold is known as a random Heegaard splitting. We use these to show the existence of infinitely many closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds with any given value of the Casson invariant. This is joint work with Alex Lubotzky and Conan Wu. Please join us for lunch after the talk! Cheers, Stephan