Where: Silberman building, Rashel Auditorium 

Live broadcast link: https://huji.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=b0830b6f-fb52...

Title:  Hilbert Schmidt stability and Characters on amenable groups

Abstract: Consider the following classical question: Given two almost commuting matrices, are they necessarily close to a pair of commuting matrices? The first goal of this lecture is to recast this question in terms of a lifting property for groups, called stability. We will introduce this notion which has gained interest in recent years, and use it to give a positive answer to the above question in the setting of the normalized Hilbert Schmidt distance. On the way we will relate stability of an amenable group to a finite-dimensional approximation property of characters on it.

This talk is based on the masters thesis of the speaker and works of Tatiana Shulman and Don Hadwin.