Topology Seminar: Tali Pinsky

A closed geodesic on a surface can also be viewed as a closed orbit of the geodesic flow on the unit tangent bundle of the surface. In this talk I will discuss the main tool for studying the knot-properties of closed orbits of (three dimensional) flows. This tool is called a template, first defined and used by Birman and Williams to study the well known Lorenzbutterfly.

The theory of templates was first used for geodesic flows by Ghys. I will discuss questions related to his extraordinary result, that the closed geodesics on the modular surface equal the closed orbits on the Lorenz butterfly, and will discuss some generalization of his methods to other hyperbolic surfaces.