Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The Deligne category of symmetric groups is the additive Karoubi closure of the partition category. The partition category may be interpreted, following Comes, via a particular linearization of the category of two-dimensional oriented cobordisms. In this talk we will use a generalization of this approach to the Deligne category coupled with the universal construction of two-dimensional topological theories to construct their multi-parameter monoidal generalizations, one for each rational function in one variable. This talk is based on joint work with M. Khovanov.