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Bordered Heegaard Floer Homology: A Toy Model

Geometry/Topology

Speaker: Dylan Thurston, Columbia University, MSRI
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Tue, Feb 16 2010, 4:10PM

Heegaard Floer homology is a homological invariant of 3-manifolds and knots whose Euler characteristic is the Alexander polynomial. It detects knot genus (or more generally the Thurston norm) and fibration, and has many other uses. There is an elegant combinatorial formulation of knot Heegaard Floer homology from grid diagrams, a grown-up version of tic-tac-toe. After reviewing this construction, we then use grid diagrams to motivate an extension of the theory to 3-manifolds with parametrized boundary. This is joint work with Robert Lipshitz and Peter Ozsváth.