April 27, 2007

Ronald Fintushel (Michigan State)

Title: Reverse engineering families of 4-manifolds

Abstract: In this talk I will discuss a 3-step procedure which we call "reverse engineering" and which can be used to construct infinite families of smooth 4-manifolds in a given homeomorphism type. As an application of this technique we give (yet another) construction of an infinite family of distinct smooth manifolds homeomorphic to CP^2 # 3(-CP^2). Reverse engineering is joint work with Ron Stern and the computation of the fundamental group for the fake CP^2 # 3(-CP^2)'s and some other small 4-manifolds is joint work with Ron Stern and Doug Park.