Dror Bar-Natan (University of Toronto): Cars, Interchanges, Traffic Counters, and some Pretty Darned Good Knot Invariants

Abstract:

Reporting on joint work with Roland van der Veen, I'll tell you some stories about $\rho_1$, an easy to define, strong, fast to compute, homomorphic, and well-connected knot invariant. $\rho_1$ was first studied by Rozansky and Overbay, it is dominated by the coloured Jones polynomial (but it isn't lesser!), it has far-reaching generalizations, and I wish I understood it.

For further details see http://drorbn.net/bu23 (talk number 2)

Online access:
Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/95764990745?pwd=OWFxTi9mL2I1MHVrbmQrU09zT0M5QT09
Meeting ID: 957 6499 0745
Passcode: 412839