The MIT Math community celebrated International Women in Math Day on May 12 with guest speaker Melanie Matchett Wood from Harvard University.
“It was a wonderful event that brought our diverse community together,” says Professor Ju-Lee Kim, who helped run the event. “Going forward, I hope this annual event will be an opportunity to celebrate diversity and strengthen the math community.”
The abstract for Wood’s talk, “Finite quotients of 3-manifold groups”:
It is well-known that for any finite group G, there exists a closed
3-manifold M with G as a quotient of the fundamental group of M.
However, we can ask more detailed questions about the possible finite
quotients of 3-manifold groups, e.g. for G and H finite
groups, does there exist a 3-manifold group with G as a quotient but
not H as a quotient? We answer all such questions. To prove
non-existence, we prove new parity properties of the fundamental
groups of 3-manifolds. To prove existence of 3-manifolds with certain
finite quotients but not others, we use a probabilistic method, by
first proving a formula for the distribution of the fundamental group
of a random 3-manifold, in the sense of Dunfield-Thurston. This is
joint work with Will Sawin.
International Women in Math Day is celebrated on the birthday of the late Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who was the first woman to win the Fields Medal.