Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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In this introductory talk I will outline the general landscape of Milnor’s invariants for links. First introduced in Milnor’s master’s thesis in 1954, these invariants capture fundamental information about links and have remained a fascinating object of study throughout the past half century. In the early 80s, Turaev and Porter independently proved their long-conjectured correspondence with Massey products of the link complement and in 1990, Tim Cochran introduced a beautiful construction to compute them using intersection theory. I will give an overview of these constructions and motivate the importance of these invariants, particularly for the study of links considered up to concordance.