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

Pablo Portilla Cuadrado,
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
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.



