UW-PIMS Mathematics Colloquium: Dusa McDuff

A symplectic structure is a kind of geometric structure that can be put on an even dimensional space. It generalizes the notion of an area form in two dimensions in such a way that many of the special dynamical features of area preserving geometry (such as the existence of extra fixed points) persist. However the global properties of this geometry are still not well understood. This will be a talk for nonspecialists that explains some known facts and some open problems, concentrating on recent progress in understanding symplectic embeddings.