Understanding infinite groups via their actions on Banach spaces

One way of studying infinite groups is by analysing their actions on classes of interesting spaces. This is the case for Kazhdan's property (T) and for Haagerup's property (also called a-T-menability), formulated in terms of actions on Hilbert spaces and relevant in many areas (e.g. for the Baum-Connes conjectures, in combinatorics, for the study of expander graphs, in ergodic theory, etc.) 

Recently, these properties have been reformulated for actions on Banach spaces, with very interesting results.

This talk will overview some of these reformulations and their applications. Part of the talk is on joint work with Ashot Minasyan and Mikael de la Salle, and with John Mackay.