Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing
Rasmussen's combinatorial proof of the Milnor conjecture
Geometry/Topology| Speaker: | Mikhail Khovanov, UC Davis |
| Location: | 693 Kerr |
| Start time: | Wed, Nov 24 2004, 4:10PM |
The slice genus of a knot is the minimal genus of an oriented surface properly embedded in a 4-ball with the knot as its boundary. Milnor's conjecture about the exact value of the slice genus of a torus knot was proved about ten years ago by Kronheimer and Mrowka via Donaldson theory. Much more recently, Jacob Rasmussen found a purely combinatorial proof of the conjecture. I'll explain his proof in this talk.