UCalgary Peripatetic Seminar: Marcy Robertson

The idea behind Grothendieck-Teichmüller theory is to study the absolute Galois group via its actions on (the collection of all) moduli spaces of genus g curves. In practice, this is often done by studying an intermediate object: The Grothendieck-Teichmüler group, GT.

In this talk, I’ll describe an algebraic gadget built from simple decomposition data of Riemann surfaces. This gadget, called an infinity modular operad, provides a model for the collection of all moduli spaces of genus g curves with n boundaries, which we justify by showing that the automorphisms of this algebraic object is isomorphic to a subgroup of Grothendieck-Teichmüller group.