This talk was a visual introduction to algebraic topology. It began by introducing the notion of “working up to homotopy” and the fundamental group. Then it introduced covering spaces as way of translating algebraic data to more geometric language. It concluded by giving a visualization of computing the fundamental group of the circle using the language of covering spaces.

Although there is no audio as it was a live presentation, the animations are available by downloading pres.pptx and watching them via powerpoint. I decided to artifically extend each slide in order to compensate for what I had to say for each slide, so it may take some time before the animation actually begins; feel free to scroll through each slide until an animation actually starts.