Affiliation:
All Souls College, Oxford
Date:
Wed, 26/06/2019 - 17:00 - 18:00
This talk was originally inspired by Zagier's construction of single-valued polylogarithms and regulators in the late 80's.
In short, single-valued functions are ubiquitous in mathematics and physics, since well-defined problems have well-defined answers. On the other hand, the solution to such a problem is often given by an integral, which is usually a multi-valued function of its parameters. The reason is that integration is a pairing between differential forms and chains of integration, and the latter are ambiguously defined.