Vortrag vom Professor Dr. Sebastian Hensel ( Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) im Rahmen des Augsburger Mathematischen Kolloquiums.

Surfaces are amongst the most ubiquitous objects in geometry and topology. While they are very basic topological spaces, their symmetry groups are surprisingly rich and still produce a wealth of interesting questions. In recent years, negatively curved geometry has turned out to be a particularly successful tool in the study of mapping class groups. This is facilitated by the so-called curve graph, which encodes intersection patterns between simple closed curves on surfaces. In this talk we will explore these connections, starting with very classical and explicit examples, and ending with a very recent result (joint with Jonathan Bowden and Richard Webb) which answers a question of Burago-Ivanov-Polterovich on isotopically trivial surface homeomorphisms.