PGR Seminar - Massey Products and Moment-Angel Complexes, Abi Linton (Southampton) Seminar

Event details

Massey products are higher cohomology operations that were first important to show the linking of the Borromean rings (which isn’t detected by linking number/cup products alone) and are now still important in the study of formality of spaces, or differentials in spectral sequences, among other things. Moment-angle complexes, one of the main objects in Toric Topology, have a natural underlying combinatorial structure that lends itself very nicely to the study of combinatorial obstructions to Massey products in the cohomology of moment-angle complexes, which are otherwise extremely difficult to compute! In this talk, we will examine these combinatorial connections, leading up to two different frameworks of combinatorial operations that create non-trivial Massey products of classes of any given degree.