Breadcrumb
Flat surfaces and the Veech Dichotomy
Fri 22 February 2013, 16:30
Mauro Artigiani
Organisers: Andrew Poulton, Henry Reeve
ABSTRACT
Flat surfaces are the analogous of the flat torus in higher genera. These are incredibly rich objects both from a dynamical and from an (algebraic) complex geometry point of view which arise both from questions regarding polygonal billiards, and from Teichmueller theory, as I will briefly explain. In my talk I will introduce flat surfaces, with some easy and hopefully nice examples. After talking a bit about their general properties and the machinery used to study them I will focus on a particular class of surfaces, called Veech or Lattice surfaces. These are, in some way, the dynamical equivalent of the flat torus, as the Veech Dichotomy shows.