This is a recording of Edinburgh Mathematical Society (EMS) meeting recorded at The University of Edinburgh in October 2025.

Prof. Tara E. Brendle (University of Glasgow) presents a gentle introduction to the Torelli group of a surface. The talk will survey some of its algebraic properties as well as its connection with low-dimensional topology. Along the way she also highlight some seminal work of Joan Birman and Dennis Johnson, among others.

Prof. Tara E. Brendle is theVice President of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society (2022-present), researches geometric group theory, an area that lies in the intersection of algebra and low-dimensional topology. She is particularly interested in mapping class groups of surfaces, including braid groups, and their relationship to automorphism groups of free groups and arithmetic groups.

 

Watch ‘The Torelli group’ directly on Media Hopper Create

 

 

This recording from the Edinburgh Mathematical Society is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.

 

Header: Evolution of a Tornado, JasonWeingart, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0