An introduction to Hausdorff dimension and a collection of applications of measure zero

Xander Faber will give the talk on Monday, December 6 at 4:15 in Math 528. This lecture will be open to all.

Abstract: How does one measure the dimension of subsets of R^n which aren't smooth manifolds? For example, the standard middle-thirds Cantor set has Lebesgue measure zero, but it's uncountable. Consequently, it seems a bit harsh to label it as a set of dimension zero. Hausdorff invented a particularly nice notion of dimension which agrees with the usual sense of dimension when the subset is a submanifold, but it's far more general. The Cantor set has Hausdorff dimension log 2 / log 3.

In this talk we'll define the Hausdorff dimension, give some of its properties, and then look at a very small list of interesting applications of the theory.


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