The Burau representation

by Tara Brendle (University of Glasgow)

Friday Nov 6, 2026, 4:30 PM → 5:30 PM Europe/Berlin

Endenicher Allee 60/1-016 - Lipschitzsaal (Mathezentrum)

(Joint work with Joan Birman and Vasudha Bharathram.) In 1935 Werner Burau introduced a representation of the braid group Bn into GL(n, ℤ[t, t⁻¹]). This representation is known to be faithful for n = 3 and not to be faithful for n ≥ 5. In this talk, we will give a new proof of faithfulness for n = 3, and describe how to adapt this for the case n = 4.

Geometry and Groups in North Rhine-Westphalia