Toronto Handout on March 3
March-03-13
11:53 AM
It is the universal solution to a topological problem and it has many siblings (who talk to each other). It is explicitly computable. Its target space is in itself a space of "universal formulas in Lie algebras" (that's "the miracle"). It seems to be a complete(?) evaluation a certain gauge theory. It is related to a deep conjecture in Lie theory proven by Alekseev and Meinrenken. It has even-better-computable specializations, including one which is an "ultimate Alexander invariant". And plenty of work remains to be done.
Tennessee, SwissKnots/Strasbourg, Bonn