Introduction to Khovanov Homology

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, March 12, 2010 - 2:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Alan Diaz – Georgia Tech
Organizer
Meredith Casey
Khovanov homology is an invariant of oriented links, that is defined as the cohomology of a chain complex built from the cube of resolutions of a link diagram. Discovered in the late 90s, it is the first of, and inspiration for, a series of "categorifications" of knot invariants. In this first of two one-hour talks, I'll give some background on categorification and the Jones polynomial, defineKhovanov homology, work through some examples, and give a portion of the proof of Reidemeister invariance.