Seminar on low-dimensional topology
Summer Semester 2023
This is the website for the graduate seminar on low-dimensional topology.
Content
Low-dimensional topology is concerned with 3- and 4-dimensional manifolds and embedded, possibly tangled substructures, such as knots, links and braids. In this seminar we will meet some useful techniques for working with such objects and see why they are, in some sense, more interesting than higher-dimensional objects. Topics may include Morse theory, handle decompositions, Heegaard splittings, Kirby calculus, the h-cobordism theorem, the Alexander polynomial...