Speaker: Olguta Buse (IUI)
Title: On the benefits of inflation
Abstract: We will briefly survey the history of symplectic inflation starting with basic inflation first introduced by Lalonde and McDuff to recent developments of Pinsonnault and other authors extending versions of tamed inflations. Symplectic inflation is a method of deforming a symplectic class in the direction of Poincare duals of a symplectic submanifold of codimension 2, with most uses in 4 dimensional manifolds. We will present some recent extensions of inflations along configurations of curves. We will show how it yields new results on spaces associated with nonminimal irrational ruled surfaces, such as symplectomorphism groups or tamed almost Kahler cones. Joint work with Jun Li.