Abstract
Borel studied the topological group actions that are
possible on locally symmetric manifolds. In these two talks, I will
explain Borel's work and interpret these results as a type of rigidity
statement very much related to the well-known Borel conjecture of high
dimensional topology. In particular, I will give the characterization
of locally symmetric manifolds (of dimension not 4) which have a
unique maximal conjugacy of finite group of orientation preserving
homeomorphisms, due to Cappell, Lubotzky and myself. We will then
discuss several sources of counterexamples to stronger rigidity
statements, coming from either algebra or the theory of "nonlinear
averaging of embeddings"