"Coarse Geometry". Hirzebruch colloquium talk by Walter Neumann

Coarse geometry can lead to useful classifications. For example, the word metric on a finitely presented group recognises (up to finite groups) if that group is the fundamental group of a 3-manifold and it carries a lot of information about the manifold. I will mainly talk about coarse geometry for complex surfaces, showing that bilipschitz geometry, which is purely topological and ignores any analytic structure, can recover the local analytic structure up to Zariski equisingularity. (Joint work with Anne Pichon).