In this event organised by Women in Mathematical Sciences at Lund, we have a guest speaker from the University of Warwick. Elena Maini is a PhD student, and her research interests lie in geometric group theory. The talk will take place in MH:Hörmander in the MH building. Elena will tell us something about her research and about her career path, in a talk accessible for undergraduate students. Everybody is welcome and no registration is necessary. There will also be a get-together with the speaker after the talk. If you are interested in joining us for this get-together, please contact us at: women@math.lu.se

Title: The Burnside Problem: a fun and natural question in group theory 

Abstract: In the first part of this talk we will give an overview of what a group is, emphasising how such a simple structure has given rise to the broad branch of mathematics that takes the name of group theory.

In the second part, we will consider a very natural and famous problem in group theory, the so-called Burnside problem, which was first posed in 1902 and remained an open problem for more than 60 years. We will then give some brief ideas on how the Burnside problem can be dealt with by constructing groups acting on trees (i.e. groups whose elements "move" the vertices of special graphs called trees).