WClips/UofT Announcement

Dear Students and Others,

With help from my students, in the next semester I will be running the "wClips Seminar", which will be a combination of a class, a seminar, and an experiment. All are invited to join; we will be meeting on Wednesdays at noon at a location that will soon be announced (on the URL below) and the first meeting will take place in the first week of classes, on Wednesday January 11, 2012.

The "class" part of this affair is that we will slowly and systematically go over my in-progress joint paper with Zsuzsanna Dancso, "Finite Type Invariants of W-Knotted Objects: From Alexander to Kashiwara and Vergne" (short "WKO", and see http://www.math.toronto.edu/drorbn/papers/WKO/), section by section, lemma by lemma, and covering all necessary prerequisites as they arise (though a certain amount of mathematical maturity will certainly be assumed). Though wClips will not be on the departmental course listing and you cannot take it for credit.

The "seminar" component is the usual. Occasionally people other than me will be telling the story.

The "experiment" part is that every lecture will be video taped and every blackboard will be photographed and everything will be immediately put on the WKO website, so that at the end we will have along with the paper a "video companion" - series of video clips explaining every bit of it. The paper will be mathematically self-contained, yet in addition every section thereof will include a link/reference to the corresponding clip in its video companion. And every video clip will have its written counterpart in one of the sections of the paper.

Feel free to join or follow remotely at http://www.math.toronto.edu/drorbn/papers/WKO/! Also, please let me know if you want to be added to the wClips mailing list.

Best,

Dror.