The talk will be online, via zoom. Contact Sergey Neshveyev if you want to join.
Title: On the structure of type III factors: recent progress and open questions
Abstract: In the world of von Neumann algebras, the factors that do not have a trace, the so-called type III factors, are the most difficult to study and some of their key structural properties are still not well-understood. In this talk, I will present some recent progress on this topic. I will give a new characterization of full type III factors that was previously only known in the tracial case by the work of Connes. I will also present a partial solution to Connes’s bicentralizer problem and other related questions.