October 14, 2025
Title: What do configuration spaces tell us about a manifold? (MI talk)
Speaker: Miguel Barata
In this talk I want to explain one of the main motivations for my PhD thesis: the Goodwillie-Weiss embedding calculus. This is a homotopical tool which builds an approximation to the space of smooth embeddings Emb(M,N) via the configuration spaces of the manifolds M and N. Besides explaining the basics of embedding calculus, I hope to also say something about how it relates to operad theory, and also to my own PhD research.