Jonathan Johnson, Oklahoma State University, will present a colloquium titled “Keeping Things in Order” as part of the Mathematics Department Colloquium Lecture series.

The abstract for the lecture is:  In the past couple of decades, group orderability has played a surprising role in the study of 3-manifolds. In this talk, we will focus on two key questions. When can the elements of a group be bi-ordered; that is, when is there a total ordering of a group’s elements invariant under group multiplication? Second, when does an automorphism of a group preserve a bi-ordering of the group? In particular, we will explore these questions for the fundamental groups of exteriors of links in the 3-sphere.

The Math Department is a part of K-State’s College of Arts and Sciences.  To learn more about opportunities in Math at K-State, visit the math department website.