Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We will present an introduction to gauge theory and classical Chern-Simons theory, a 3-dimensional topological gauge field theory whose quantization yields new insights about knot invariants such as the Jones polynomial. Then we will give a sketch of quantum Chern-Simons theory and how Witten used it as a 3-dimensional method to obtain the Jones polynomial, as well as how it may be used to obtain other powerful knot and 3-manifold invariants. No physics background is necessary.