Principal Investigator: Jozef H. Przytycki, Yongwu Rong, Alexander N. Shumakovitch, Hao Wu
A series of conferences devoted to knot theory and its ramifications will be held in 2008-2010, continuing the "Knots in Washington" conferences held every semester in the greater Washington, D.C. area since fall 1995. Plenary talks will survey the state of knowledge in areas such as Khovanov homology, Heegard Floer homology, and categorification of existing invariants such as skein modules. Contributed talks and periods devoted to interaction among participants provide opportunities for graduate students and recent PhDs to be a part of "Knots in Washington," and the organizers encourage students and junior researchers to attend these meetings.
Low dimensional topology studies shapes of three and four dimensional spaces. These dimensions are of particular interest to us because they are the dimensions of our space and our space-time. Knot theory is a subfield of low dimensional topology, which studies the knottedness in our space. One of the main goals of knot theory is to distinguish knotted objects. This is often done by means of the so called "knot invariants," functions that replace geometric objects, such as knots, with those that are easier to compare. Over the past two decades, there have been a flourish of new invariants in low dimensional topology, boosted by ideas from gauge theory, quantum algebras, and mathematical physics. The purpose of the "Knots in Washington Conferences" is to bring together the researchers of the field, including established mathematicians as well as graduate students and recent PhDs, to discuss the state of the art of the subject. The conference web page is http://home.gwu.edu/~przytyck/knots/index.html.
