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http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/activities/scientific/seminarseries/alltalks.cfm?CurrentPage=1&SeminarID=836
impressive guy. I'm hoping they post the video (as they sometimes do with these seminar talks)
==quote from Perimeter seminar talk announcement==
Speaker: Hendryk Pfeiffer
Title: Open-closed TQFTs and Khovanov homology
Date: Thursday October 19, 2006, 1:30 PM
Abstract: Khovanov homology categorifies the Jones polynomial and thereby turns an invariant of links in 3-dimensional space into an invariant of knotted surfaces in 4-dimensional space. I review this construction and sketch why it is relevant to the search for 4-dimensional quantum gravity. At the technical level, Khovanov homology relies on a very special choice of 2-dimensional Topological Quantum Field Theory (TQFT). The fact that the boundary of a compact manifold is a closed manifold, limits this construction to links rather than tangles. I show how to generalize the notion of 2-dimensional TQFT from closed manifolds to the world-sheets of open and closed strings in order to extend Khovanov homology from links to tangles. References: math.GT/0606331, math.QA/0602047, math.AT/0510664.
==enquote==
for convenience of anyone who might want to glance at the references, here they are expanded to links
http://arxiv.org/math.GT/0606331
Open-closed TQFTs extend Khovanov homology from links to tangles
http://arxiv.org/math.QA/0602047
State sum construction of two-dimensional open-closed Topological Quantum Field Theories
http://arxiv.org/math.AT/0510664
Open-closed strings: Two-dimensional extended TQFTs and Frobenius algebras
modest disclaimer: Personally I have no ambition to read these papers. I just respect Aaron Lauda and Hendryk Pfeiffer and I think Pfeiffer's research sometimes points in genuinely unexpected directions. I would kind of like to see him at the blackboard trying to explain his ideas to the Perimeter audience.
impressive guy. I'm hoping they post the video (as they sometimes do with these seminar talks)
==quote from Perimeter seminar talk announcement==
Speaker: Hendryk Pfeiffer
Title: Open-closed TQFTs and Khovanov homology
Date: Thursday October 19, 2006, 1:30 PM
Abstract: Khovanov homology categorifies the Jones polynomial and thereby turns an invariant of links in 3-dimensional space into an invariant of knotted surfaces in 4-dimensional space. I review this construction and sketch why it is relevant to the search for 4-dimensional quantum gravity. At the technical level, Khovanov homology relies on a very special choice of 2-dimensional Topological Quantum Field Theory (TQFT). The fact that the boundary of a compact manifold is a closed manifold, limits this construction to links rather than tangles. I show how to generalize the notion of 2-dimensional TQFT from closed manifolds to the world-sheets of open and closed strings in order to extend Khovanov homology from links to tangles. References: math.GT/0606331, math.QA/0602047, math.AT/0510664.
==enquote==
for convenience of anyone who might want to glance at the references, here they are expanded to links
http://arxiv.org/math.GT/0606331
Open-closed TQFTs extend Khovanov homology from links to tangles
http://arxiv.org/math.QA/0602047
State sum construction of two-dimensional open-closed Topological Quantum Field Theories
http://arxiv.org/math.AT/0510664
Open-closed strings: Two-dimensional extended TQFTs and Frobenius algebras
modest disclaimer: Personally I have no ambition to read these papers. I just respect Aaron Lauda and Hendryk Pfeiffer and I think Pfeiffer's research sometimes points in genuinely unexpected directions. I would kind of like to see him at the blackboard trying to explain his ideas to the Perimeter audience.
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