Sir Vaughan Jones will be delivering a special talk on “Knots and links from the Thompson groups” at INI on Wednesday 14 June.
Noted for his extensive work on von Neumann algebras and recipient of the Fields Medal in 1990, Vaughan Jones is an organiser of the current six month INI programme “Operator algebras: subfactors and their applications”. This hour-long talk has been arranged at short notice due to recent and significant developments in his research.
The talk is open to all and the full details are as follows:
Date : Wednesday 14 June 2017
Time : 1.00 pm – 2:00 pm
Location : INI Seminar Room 1 (find us here)
Title : Knots and links from the Thompson groups
Abstract : We will begin with a general procedure for constructing actions of groups of fractions of certain categories and give a few examples of this procedure. We then realise the Thompson groups F, T and V as groups of fractions of categories of forests and obtain many actions of these groups on many spaces. By representing the category of forests on Conway tangles one obtains constructions of knots and links from F and T and we can show that any link can be obtained in this way. Applying a TQFT gives unitary representations on Hilbert space whose coefficients are the TQFT link invariants.