Room P3.10, Mathematics Building

Yael Karshon, University of Toronto
An Invitation to Diffeology

Diffeology, introduced around 1980 by Jean-Marie Souriau following earlier work of Kuo-Tsai Chen, gives a simple way to extend notions of differential topology beyond manifolds. A diffeology on a set specifies which maps from open subsets of Euclidean spaces to the set are “smooth”. Examples include (possibly non-Hausdorff) quotients of manifolds and (infinite dimensional) spaces of smooth mappings between manifolds.

I will present some examples and results that relate diffeology with more traditional aspects of Lie group actions.