EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: Calculus of functors and knot and link spaces
Speaker: Ismar Volic
Speaker Info: Wellesley
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:

I will survey the ways in which manifold calculus of functors has in recent years been used for extracting information about the topology of spaces of knots and links. Related homotopy-theoretic topics, such as the cosimplicial model for knots and links as well as the rational formality of the little balls operad, will also be mentioned along the way. I will end with some recent results about spaces of homotopy string links and in particular about how one can use functor calculus to extract information about Milnor invariants.