Real homotopy of configuration spaces (2019−2020)

Institution: Collège de France
Cursus: Cours Peccot [Peccot Lecture]
Responsibilities: Lectures: 8h.

Video Website of the Peccot Lectures News @ ULille Old version of the notes, in French

This is the webpage for the Peccot lecture that I gave at the Collège de France in March and May 2020.

In this lecture, we will study the real homotopy type of configuration spaces of manifolds. Configuration spaces consist in collections of pairwise distinct points in a given manifold. The study of these spaces is a classical problem in algebraic topology. An important question about configuration space is homotopy invariance: if a manifold can be continuously deformed into another one, then can the configuration spaces of the first manifold be continuously deformed in the configuration spaces of the second? This question remains open if we consider simply connected closed manifolds. In this lecture, we will see how to prove this conjecture in characteristic zero (i.e. if we restrict ourselves to algebro-topological invariants with real coefficients). We will then consider a generalization to manifolds with boundary. The proof involves ideas from the theory of operads, which will be introduced at the end of the lecture.

This lecture is based in part on joint works with Ricardo Campos, Julien Ducoulombier, Pascal Lambrechts, and Thomas Willwacher.

Practical informations

Poster for the Peccot lecture

The lessons will take place at the Collège de France (11 place Marcelin-Berthelot, in the 5th district of Paris), in room 5. They were initially planned on Wednesdays 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th, March 2020, from 11AM to 1PM. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the last two lessons were postponed respectively to May 25th and 28th (10AM–12PM) and were recorded without an audience.