An introduction to persistent homology

Title: An introduction to persistent homology

Venue: Webinar for DELTA (Descriptors of Energy Landscape by Topological Analysis

Abstract: This talk is an introduction to applied and computational topology, in particular as related to the study of energy landscapes arising in chemistry. We give a visual introduction to topology and homology groups. The focus of our talk is on persistent homology, which summarizes the changes in topological features across any increasing sequence of spaces. We emphasize sublevelset persistent homology, which provides a topological summary of real-valued functions, in particular energy functions. We also briefly introduce persistent homology applied to point cloud data, perhaps sampled from the low-energy conformations of a chemical system.