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SMRI Seminar, 22 April: Marcy Robertson – Expansions, completions and automorphisms of welded tangled foams

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SMRI Seminar
Expansions, completions and automorphisms of welded tangled foams
Marcy Robertson (University of Melbourne)
Thursday, 22 April 2021, 15:30–16:30 AEST (Sydney)
Location: The Quadrangle S227 (University of Sydney staff, students and affiliates only) and via Zoom

Abstract: Welded tangles are knotted surfaces in R^4. Bar-Natan and Dancso described a class of welded tangles which have “foamed vertices” where one allows surfaces to merge and split. The resulting welded tangled foams carry an algebraic structure, similar to the planar algebras of Jones, called a circuit algebra. In joint work with Dancso and Halacheva we provide a one-to-one correspondence between circuit algebras and a form of rigid tensor category called “wheeled props.” This is a higher dimensional version of the well-known algebraic classification of planar algebras as certain pivotal categories.

This classification allows us to connect these “welded tangled foams” to the Kashiwara-Vergne conjecture in Lie theory. In work in progress, we show that the group of homotopy automorphisms of the (rational completion of) the wheeled prop of welded foams is isomorphic to the group of symmetries KV, which acts on the solutions to the Kashiwara-Vergne conjecture. Moreover, we explain how this approach illuminates the close relationship between the group KV and the pro-unipotent Grothendieck–Teichmueller group.

Biography: Marcy Robertson obtained her PhD in Algebraic Topology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010. From there she worked in Canada, France and her native United States before settling down in Australia 2015. She is now a Senior Lecturer of Pure Mathematics at the University of Melbourne.

Please register to attend.
The seminar will be held online via Zoom. You will be sent a confirmation email with connection details.

This seminar will be recorded and made available on the SMRI Youtube channel.

Larissa Fedunik-Hofman
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