Principal Investigator: Stavros Garoufalidis, Thang T. Q. Le
This award provides partial support for participants in the International Conference on Quantum Topology to be held in Ha Noi, Vietnam, in August 2007. The conference aims to educate junior researchers in Quantum Topology, discuss new developments in the area, and bring together different points of view of Geometry, Topology, Algebra and Quantum Field Theory. Scientific themes of the conference include quantum invariants of knots and links, Heegard Floer homology, Khovanov homology, asymptotic statements for quantum invariants (including the widely--studied Volume Conjecture), and geometric topology of three--manifolds.
Quantum topology grew out of ideas and theorems of physicists and mathematicians in the 1980s and 1990s on relations between quantum field theories and geometry. That work introduced a number of new algebraic and combinatorial devices to describe and attempt to distinguish low-dimensional spaces such as the complement of a knotted curve in three-dimensional Euclidean space. This conference will bring together old and new aspects of quantum topology to add to our understanding of these tools and to uncover new problems for research in the field. See the conference web site at www.math.gatech.edu/~stavros/vietnam.html for more information.
