Braid groups are an interesting class of finitely generated groups that come up naturally in a wide range of areas in Mathematics - topology, dynamics, representation theory, cryptography, to name a few.
Part of their importance is based on the many ways in which they can be defined. We will look at a few different interpretations of braid groups, and discuss some interesting structures on them as well as their applications. Speaker(s): Urshita Pal (University of Michigan)