Topology Seminar

Mondays 3-4pm (Eastern Time), Ayres Hall 111

Organizers: Sagnik Jana, Yulan Qing

Speaker: Conrad Plaut

Title: Singular Homology at Scale

Abstract: Joint work with Ivy Day. I’ll take up where Ivy left off in her previous talk, but in case you didn’t see her talk, I’ll sketch what she presented at the beginning of my talk. This is a work in progress. We weaken the notion of continuity to define continuity at scale. We then adapt singular homology theory to this non-continuous setting. Homology at scale naturally splits into “real” homology and “phantom” homology, and real homology at scale provides what data analysts would call a “filtration” of singular homology; more formally it is an inverse system of homomorphisms, as the scale goes to 0. Homology at scale (including the phantom part) allows for a filtration of “singular homology” of discrete spaces, such as data. Analogous to what Ivy recalled from discrete homotopy theory, we are investigating when there is a discrete set of real homology critical values around which the inclusion-induced maps from one scale to a larger scale are not isomorphisms. Another question, which would extend results from discrete homotopy theory, is whether, under relatively mild circumstances, Gromov-Hausdorff close spaces have singular homology at scale that is “close" in a sense that I’ll discuss.


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Organizers: Sagnik Jana, Yulan Qing.