Informal Friday Seminar: Le Fils -- Introduction to translation surfaces

Title: Introduction to translation surfaces.  

Abstract: How can billiards help us find shortest paths in the space of Riemann
surfaces? What does this have to do with shuffling pieces of intervals? 

Translation surfaces and their moduli spaces will allow us to answer these questions.  

Gluing opposite sides of a parallelogram together gives a torus.  A translation surface
is a surface obtained by identifying sides of more complicated polygons by
translations.  

I will give an introduction to translation surfaces and their moduli space.  We will
discuss dynamics on both of these objects and their connections.