Title: An immersed analogue of stable commutator length for surface groups.

Abstract: Commutator length is a group theoretical analogue of genus. By
taking a limit, stable commutator length, scl, is obtained. This is a group
invariant that can be studied topologically via maps of surfaces into
manifolds. As scl detects the existence of surface subgroups, it is an
important invariant of 3-manifolds. However, there are open questions
regarding its computability and the structure of its unit norm ball. This
talk will give some background on scl in low dimensional topology, and will
outline work in progress of the speaker towards resolving these questions
for closed surface and 3-manifold groups.