Knot invariants and algebraic structures based on knots

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - 12:20pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Thang Le – Georgia Tech
Organizer
Trevor Gunn
A knot is a simple closed curve in the 3-space. Knots appeared as one of the first objects of study in topology. At first knot theory was rather isolated in mathematics. Lately due to newly discovered invariants and newly established connections to other branches of mathematics, knot theory has become an attractive and fertile area where many interesting, intriguing ideas collide. In this talk we discuss a new class of knot invariants coming out of the Jones polynomial and an algebra of surfaces based on knots (skein algebra) which has connections to many important objects including hyperbolic structures of surfaces and quantum groups. The talk is elementary.