This is the homepage for the 2023 Summer Minicourses, a series of week-long graduate student-run minicourses at UT Austin.
This summer, the minicourses are being organized by Riccardo Pedrotti, Aru Mukherjea, Luis Torres, and Hunter Vallejos. You can contact us at SMC.Organizers@gmail.com.
What are summer minicourses?
Minicourses focus on tools, methods, and ideas that aren't usually covered in prelims but are useful in topics classes/research. The idea is that a week-long minicourse will remain engaging, be easier to schedule, and help provide focus. These courses are primarily for graduate students, but all are welcome to participate!
Past courses have included:
- Review of classes that were taught in previous years.
- Primers for classes that will be taught next year.
- Examples of useful computational tools.
- Introductions to a subject/research area.
This week's courses
Introduction to Teichmüller Dynamics
Instructor: Hunter Vallejos
When and where: July 17–July 21, 1pm–2pm CST. Zoom: https://utexas.zoom.us/j/98558323441 Meeting ID: 985 5832 3441
Abstract. The goal of the course is outline some of the basic objects involved in Teichmüller dynamics (such as Teichmüller space, quadratic differentials, measured laminations, etc.), followed by a presentation of a few big results in the field. Possible topics to be covered include Siegel-Veech constants and the Siegel-Veech formula, ergodic and mixing properties of Teichmüller geodesic flow, Thurston's stretch maps and earthquake flow, and Mirzakhani's conjugacy. (This list is way too ambitious and we'll probably only do a couple of these).
These courses were inspired in large part by the ones held at University of Michigan, which were started by Takumi Murayama.
You can click here to be added to the email list and click here to join the Discord server.