Friday, October 31, 2014 (3:00 p.m. in Yost 306)

Title: The Magnitude of Metric Spaces

Speaker: Mark Meckes (Case Western Reserve University)

Abstract: How big is a geometric object?  Of course, this question is ill-posed, with many possible answers.  In this talk I’ll discuss a notion of size, named “magnitude”, introduced by Tom Leinster and Simon Willerton.  As we’ll see, magnitude, which was inspired by category theory, turns out to be related to a surprising array of fields, including integral geometry, potential theory, and even theoretical ecology.