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Witten: More on 3D gravity
Edward Witten gave two talks at MIT last week. The first was on gauge theory and wild ramification – very similar to earlier work he did with Kapustin and Gukov on geometric Langlands, but with some...
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Embedded TQFT?
So, a subject rather near and dear to the hearts of many of my fellow co-bloggers is that of 1+1-dimensional TQFT: that is, of monoidal functors from the category of 1-manifolds with morphisms given by...
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Symplectic duality slides
I’ve been too lazy to write in detail about the progress in my research (well, I am writing six papers and applying to jobs, so it isn’t entirely due to laziness), but I did recently speak in the...
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TQFTs via Planar Algebras
So today I am giving a talk in the Subfactor seminar here at Berkeley, and I thought it might by nice to write my pre-talk notes here on the blog, rather then on pieces of paper destined for the...
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TQFTs via Planar Algebras (Part 2)
In my last post I explained a strategy for using n-dimensional algebraic objects to construct (n+1)-dimensional TQFTs, and I went through the n=1 case: Showing how a semi-simple symmetric Frobenius...
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TQFTs via Planar Algebras (Part 3)
This is the third and final post in my series about using planar algebras to construct TQFTs. In the first post we looked at the 2D case and came up with a master strategy for constructing TQFTs. In...
View ArticleLurie on TFTs
This morning Jacob Lurie posted a draft of an expository paper on his work (with Mike Hopkins) classifying extended (infinity, n)-categorical topological field theories and their relation to the...
View ArticleExtended TFTs
So I’ve finally managed to bang my dissertation into something more or less ready for public consumption. It is basically finished (except for some typos and spell checking). It is available on my new...
View ArticleUpcoming conference: Workshop on operator algebras and conformal field theory...
I wanted to take a moment to plug a conference in my soon-to-be hometown Eugene, OR organized by my once and future colleague Nick Proudfoot. Aside from Eugene being lovely in August, I felt this...
View ArticleConference on Higher Gauge Theory, Quantum Gravity, and Topological Field Theory
In February there is going to be a workshop and school dedicated to exploring the interactions of Quantum Gravity, Higher Gauge Theory, and Topological Field Theory. I’m excited about the chance to...
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