Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Last week we motivated and defined Khovanov homology, an invariant of oriented links whose graded Euler characteristic is the Jones polynomial. We'll discuss the proof of Reidemeister invariance, then survey some important applications and extensions, including Lee theory and Rasmussen's s-invariant, the connection to knot Floer homology, and how the latter was used by Hedden and Watson to show unknot detection for a large class of knots.