Event № 396

It is an old conjecture that closed (even dimensional) manifolds with nonzero Euler characteristic admit no flat structure. Although it turns out that there do exist manifolds with nonzero Euler characteristic that admit a flat structure, for closed aspherical manifolds this conjecture is still widely open. In 1958 Milnor proved the conjecture for surfaces through his celebrated inequality. Gromov naturally put Milnor’s inequality in the context of bounded cohomology, relating it to the simplicial volume. 

I will show how to find upper and lower bounds for the simplicial volume of complex hyperbolic surfaces. The upper bound naturally leads to so-called Milnor-Wood inequalities strong enough to exclude the existence of flat structures on these manifolds.