Speaker: Joshua Turner (University of Virginia)

Title: Trees Associated with Unitary Partition Complexes

Abstract: In a recent paper, Heuts and Moerdijk develop a poset of trees whose classifying space is homotopy equivalent to the n-th partition complex, that is, the classifying space of the poset of partitions of a set with n elements. The latter poset features in work of Arone, Dwyer, and Lesh, and it finds a unitary analog introduced by Arone and Lesh. In joint work with Julie Bergner, Pedro Brunialti Lima de Andrade, and Eleftherios Chatzitheodoridis., we develop a topological poset of trees whose classifying space is homotopy equivalent to the n-th unitary partition complex, that is, the classifying space of the topological poset of partitions of n-dimensional complex space in pairwise orthogonal subspaces. Our work builds on the study of unitary partition complexes by Bergner, Joachimi, Lesh, Stojanoska, and Wickelgren, and it also entails some new results in the theory of topological categories that may be of independent interest.

Location: 1146 Faculty/Administration Building

Time: 2:00 - 3:30 PM

Date: November 17, 2026