Families of groups such as symmetric groups, braid groups, general linear groups, mapping class groups of 2- or 3-dimensional manifolds, or Higman-Thompson groups share the following stability phenomenon: the homology of the nth group in the sequence is isomorphic to that of the (n+1)st group in a range of degrees increasing with n. This phenomemon is called homological stability.
In this series of talks, I will give an introduction to homological stability, showing what the above examples have in common. I'll explain through the framework of homogeneous categories how the question of stability boils down to the question of high connectivity of certain simplicial complexes and give an idea of how these connectivity results are proved in different examples.