Title:  A Brief Introduction to buildings.

Speaker:  Robert Liebler

Abstract:  Each building is a "thick" version of a Coxeter group.
Almost all finite simple groups arise as symmetry groups
of some building.  This  combinatorial structure was
invented by J. Tits almost 50 years ago as a unifying
abstraction of more technical theories.

Yet it is rich enough to have played a pivotal role in the
finite simple group classification, is implicit in the now
popular industry called "combinatorial representation theory"
and has wide application elsewhere.

I will present a sequence of examples to give the flavor of
this important subject without getting involved with to many
details starting  with very familiar linear algebra to
introduce the axiom system, and eventually ending with
local fields and the infinite Coxeter groups \tilde{A_n}.