Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA)

Two-lecture series by Mohammed Abouzaid (Stanford): 'Framed bordism and nearby Lagrangians' (September 16) and 'Complex bordism and Hamiltonian fibrations' (September 17), on bordism-theoretic approaches to Lagrangian embeddings in symplectic manifolds and Arnold's nearby Lagrangian conjecture.

Robert E. Gompf (University of Texas, Austin) lectures on 'On classifying smoothings of R^4 - from the beginning to the present', tracing how 4-manifold topology emerged from the breakthroughs of Freedman and Donaldson and how Euclidean 4-space admits exotic smoothings that resist classification by countable numerical invariants.