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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 |
Description
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.