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# Colloquium: Instantons and Knot Concordance

Juanita Pinzon-Caicedo, Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame, will present a colloquium titled “Instantons and Knot Concordance" as part of the Mathematics Department Women Lecture Series in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

The abstract for the lecture is: Knot concordance can be regarded as the study of knots as boundaries of surfaces embedded in spaces of dimension 4. Specifically, two knots $K_0$ and $K_1$ are said to be smoothly concordant if there is a smooth embedding of the annulus $S^1 × [0, 1]$ into the “cylinder” $S^3 × [0, 1]$ that restricts to the given knots at each end. Smooth concordance is an equivalence relation, and the set $C$ of smooth concordance classes of knots is an abelian group with connected sum as the binary operation. The algebraic structure of $C$, the concordance class of the unknot, and the set of knots that are topologically slice but not smoothly slice are much studied objects in low-dimensional topology. Gauge theoretical results on the nonexistence of certain definite smooth 4-manifolds can be used to better understand these objects. In particular, the study of anti-self dual connections on 4-manifolds can be used to shown that the group of topologically slice knots up to smooth concordance contains a subgroup isomorphic to $Z^\infty$.

The Math Department is a part of K-State’s College of Arts and Sciences.  To learn more about opportunities in Math at K-State, visit the math department website.

Also streamed live:  https://youtu.be/RWFFORUQkJM

Thursday, October 14 at 2:30pm to 3:20pm

CW 122

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Mathematics, Department of
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