Skip to the Main Content

Note:These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards. They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in Mozilla. My best suggestion (and you will thank me when surfing an ever-increasing number of sites on the web which have been crafted to use the new standards) is to upgrade to the latest version of your browser. If that's not possible, consider moving to the Standards-compliant and open-source Mozilla browser.

February 10, 2009

Link Homology in Paris

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 OO, diagram algebras, and link homology.

I’m mainly dying to learn more about ‘category OO’, 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

TrackBack URL for this Entry:   https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/MT-3.0/dxy-tb.fcgi/1910

5 Comments & 0 Trackbacks

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

Post a New Comment