Priyam Patel, University of Utah
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Surfaces fall into two categories: finite-type and infinite-type. The theory of infinite-type surfaces has been historically less developed than that of finite-type surfaces, but in the last few years, there has been a surge of interest in surfaces of infinite type and their mapping class groups (informally thought of as the groups of topological symmetries of these surfaces). In this talk, I will survey some of the biggest open problems in this quickly growing subfield of geometric group theory and topology, and discuss some of my own recent joint work towards resolving them.