## February 10, 2009

#### Posted by John Baez

With any luck, I’ll be in Paris this summer and thus able to learn more about the ‘practical applications’ of categorification to knot theory:

There will be some mini-courses:

• Vincent COLIN : Contact homology: computations and applications.
• Peter OZSVATH : An introduction to Heegaard–Floer homology.
• Lev ROZANSKY : Matrix factorizations and link homology.
• Catharina STROPPEL : Category $O$, diagram algebras, and link homology.

I’m mainly dying to learn more about ‘category $O$’, which is a very natural category of (typically infinite-dimensional) representations of a simple Lie algebra. Of course I could just learn about it from my colleague Apoorva here at UC Riverside:

But, Catharina Stroppel will have more to say about its application to categorified link invariants.

In case you’re wondering, ‘BGG’ is short for ‘Bernstein, Gelfand and Gelfand’. That’s because Gelfand did two-thirds of the work on this paper.

Posted at February 10, 2009 1:42 AM UTC

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### Re: Link Homology in Paris

That’s because Gelfand did two-thirds of the work on this paper.

One of the Gelfands (I’m not sure which one) is not going to appreciate that joke.

Posted by: Ben Webster on February 10, 2009 5:48 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

### Re: Link Homology in Paris

Why? Does one of them lack a sense of humor?

Posted by: John Baez on February 10, 2009 8:01 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

### Re: Link Homology in Paris

Clearly the angry one would be whichever of them you weren’t referring to!

Posted by: Noah Snyder on February 11, 2009 12:08 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

### Re: Link Homology in Paris

John,
Surely you meant GelfandS did 2/3 of the work

Posted by: jim stasheff on February 11, 2009 1:46 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

### Re: Link Homology in Paris

Jim,
Isn’t it obvious that I was joking?

Posted by: John Baez on February 11, 2009 9:35 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

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