About the talk

In this talk, we will look at Bass-Serre theory, which determines the decomposition of a group by its action on a simplicial tree. We will also look at some associated results like Grushko decomposition theorem, which expresses a finitely generated group as a free product of finitely many freely indecomposable groups and Stallings ends theorem which studies the further decomposition of freely indecomposable groups using the notion of ‘ends’.

About the speaker

Dr Swathi Krishna is a geometric group theorist whose research focuses on hyperbolic and relatively hyperbolic groups and their boundaries. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the TIFR Centre for Applicable Mathematics, Bengaluru. She completed her PhD at IISER Mohali, where she studied Cannon–Thurston maps for certain extensions of hyperbolic groups. Swathi has published in journals such as Algebraic & Geometric Topology, Topology and its Applications, and Proceedings – Mathematical Sciences, and has held post-doctoral positions at TIFR Mumbai, the UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, and the Kerala School of Mathematics.