The International Center for Mathematical Sciences – Sofia (ICMS-Sofia)

presents

ICMS Seminar, joint meeting with the Seminar on Singularities

Tuesday, October 13, 2026 — 13:00

Room 403, IMI-BAS

Lê’s conjecture and knot cobordisms

Portrait of Pablo Portilla Cuadrado.

Pablo Portilla Cuadrado,
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Abstract:

I will present a proof of Lê’s conjecture, in its formulation that every holomorphic map germ admitting an injective representative has nonzero differential at the origin. The proof first reduces the possible counterexamples to map germs of order 2, 3 or 4. Separate arguments developed using AI exclude each of these three cases. The talk will focus on the first part: the reduction theorem, which combines plane curve singularities, explicit knot cobordisms, and bounds for the Seifert genus coming from the Υ invariant in knot Floer homology. I will conclude with an outline of the proof for the three remaining cases, based on a systematic study of holomorphic map germs of low order through their weighted initial forms.