EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: Bordered Heegaard Floer homology: why? (and what?)
Speaker: Robert Lipshitz
Speaker Info: Columbia
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:

Heegaard Floer homology is a family of invariants in low-dimensional topology pioneered by Peter Ozsvath and Zoltan Szabo. Parts of the Heegaard Floer package form what some call a "4-dimensional topological field theory": it assigns groups to closed 3-dimensional manifolds and homomorphisms to (smooth, connected) 4-dimensional cobordisms. Bordered Heegaard Floer homology is an extension of Heegaard Floer theory to 3-manifolds with boundary. In this talk we will survey the structures of these theories, their origins and motivations, and some of their relationships to other fields -- gauge theory, symplectic topology, Khovanov homology and categorification of quantum groups. Most of the talk will be broadly accessible.