dr Piotr Sułkowski (Wydział Fizyki UW)

On knots, strings, and quantum fields

In this talk I will present relations between knot theory, quantum field theory and string theory. Since the seminal paper by Witten on Chern-Simons theory and Jones polynomial in 1989 such relations have been very intensively studied. In the last two decades it turned out that the methods of quantum field theory and string theory are often more effective than traditional mathematical approaches, and they led to several remarkable discoveries. After a brief historical overview of the subject I will present a review of topics currently studied, in particular those related to the homological knot invariants.