The Real Friends are the Betti Numbers We Calculated Along the Way

Abstract

Ever wondered what your life might have been like if you chose differently in the past? This talk is about how I nearly became a geometric group theorist – until I saw homological algebra used to prove theorems about modules. My emphasis will be on what Betti numbers are, a few ways to think about them, some lovely borrowed ideas from calculus, and a few of my favorite theorems and conjectures.