Student Algebra Seminar: Wiggins -- Grassmannians and the universal bundle

Giulian Wiggins will give the Seminar’s sixth talk in Semester 2 tomorrow afternoon on
Zoom.  Please find the details below.  Anyone desiring to attend the talk or join the
mailing list is warmly invited to get in touch: ciappara@maths.usyd.edu.au.  

Title: Grassmannians and the universal bundle 

Abstract: For any topological group G there is a principal G-bundle EG—>BG such that
for any paracompact space X there is a bijection between homotopy classes of maps
X—>BG and principal G-bundles over X.  As a consequence we will see that rank n (real
or complex) vector bundles over X are in bijection with homotopy classes of maps from X
to a certain limit of grassmannians.  In this talk we explain what this means.  You will
not need to have attended previous talks in this series to understand this lecture.  

Time and date: 3 pm Wednesday 23 September 

Seminar website: https://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/ciappara/SAS.html