Chaire de la Vallée Poussin 2015
1-5 June 2015
Institut de Recherche en Mathematique et Physique
Université catholique de Louvain,
Belgium
Since its creation in 2001, the Chaire de la Vallée Poussin is
entrusted annually to a mathematical prominent figure.
It was held in the past by Jacques Tits, Perci Diaconis, Yakov
Eliashberg, Etienne Ghys, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Ross Street, among other
renowned mathematicians.
The Chaire de la Vallée Poussin consists in five one-hour lectures to
be held during one week at the Université catholique de Louvain in
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. The inaugural lecture is expected to be at a
colloquium level and accessible to all PhD students in mathematics. The
remaining lectures are usually independent among themselves.
Dror Bar-Natan (U.
Toronto): Expansions
It
is less well known than it should be, that the standard notion of an
expansion of a smooth function on a Euclidean space into a power series
("the Taylor expansion") is vastly more general than if first seems; in
fact, it is almost ridiculously more general. In my series of talks I
will concentrate on expansions for knotted objects in 3 and 4
dimensions, on how these expansions relate these objects to problems in
Lie theory, and on how these expansions may be constructed using tools
from quantum field theory (which in themselves are "expansions").
Description
of the course
Schedule:
Lecture 1 (june 1 2015 - 16h30) :
The Kashiwara-Vergne problem and Topology
(followed by a reception)
Lecture 2 (june 2 2015 - 15h00) : From Knots to Lie Algebras
Lecture 3 (june 3 2015 - 15h00) : Chern-Simons Theory and Feynman
Diagrams
Lecture 4 (june 4 2015 - 15h00) : Knotted Trivalent Graphs and
Associators
Lecture 5 (june 5 2015 - 14h00) : Back to 4D
Web page of the CDLVP 2015 at
the UCL
Everybody is welcome - People planning to attend the lectures are
invited to contact name(at)uclouvain(dot)be (name = pedro.vaz)