Colloquium - Michael Willis

Date: December 10, 2021

Time: 4:00PM - 5:00PM

Location: BLOC 117

Speaker: Michael Willis, Stanford University

Description:
TITLE: Knots, Links, and the Infinite
ABSTRACT: The study of knots and links in 3-dimensional space is a large and dynamic field of research in mathematics, with interesting connections to many other branches of both mathematics and the sciences. In this talk I will give a definition for knots (and links), followed by a brief overview of both how they may appear in other fields and how we can study them. I will then focus on a specific set of tools for studying knots based upon the celebrated Jones polynomial. After considering a finite example, we will discuss what happens to our tools in the limit as our knots become “infinitely twisted” before indicating how this limiting behavior has topological applications related to the 4-dimensional smooth Poincare conjecture.