Related papers: Introduction to Whitney Towers
By classical results of Rochlin, Thom, Wallace and Lickorish, it is well-known that any two 3-manifolds (with diffeomorphic boundaries) are related one to the other by surgery operations. Yet, by restricting the type of the surgeries, one…
The twisted Alexander polynomials of a space, associated to a linear representation $\sigma$ of the fundamental group, are non-abelian refinements of the classical Alexander polynomial from knot theory. In this paper, we show that they…
This workshop about triangulations of manifolds in computational geometry and topology was held at the 2014 CG-Week in Kyoto, Japan. It focussed on computational and combinatorial questions regarding triangulations, with the goal of…
This work presents a framework for billiards in convex domains on two dimensional Riemannian manifolds. These domains are contained in connected, simply connected open subsets which are totally normal. In this context, some basic properties…
We describe Taylor towers for spaces of knots arising from Goodwillie-Weiss calculus of the embedding functor and extend the configuration space integrals of Bott and Taubes from spaces of knots to the stages of the towers. We show that…
We consider curves which go around Whitney umbrella. Then we consider the geodesic and the normal curvatures, ruled surfaces generated by the normal vector and normal developable surfaces with respect to the tangent and bi-tangent vectors…
These are expanded notes from a four lecture mini-course given by the author at the Spring School on Non-archimedean geometry and Eigenvarieties, held at the University of Heidelberg in March 2023. The course discusses coherent sheaves,…
These lecture notes give an introduction to a number of ideas and methods that have been useful in the study of complex systems ranging from spin glasses to D-branes on Calabi-Yau manifolds. Topics include the replica formalism, Parisi's…
We give a brief survey on some new developments on elliptic operators on manifolds with polyhedral singularities. The material essentially corresponds to a talk given by the author during the Conference "Elliptic and Hyperbolic Equations on…
We define a pants distance for knotted surfaces in 4-manifolds which generalizes the complexity studied by Blair-Campisi-Taylor-Tomova for surfaces in the 4-sphere. We determine that if the distance computed on a given diagram does not…
We propose a way of computing 4-manifold invariants, old and new, as chiral correlation functions in half-twisted 2d $\mathcal{N}=(0,2)$ theories that arise from compactification of fivebranes. Such formulation gives a new interpretation of…
Quaternionic and octonionic realizations of Clifford algebras and spinors are classified and explicitly constructed in terms of recursive formulas. The most general free dynamics in arbitrary signature space-times for both quaternionic and…
This brief set of notes presents a modest introduction to the basic features entering the construction of supersymmetric quantum field theories in four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime, building a bridge from similar lectures presented at a…
We introduce bridge trisections of knotted surfaces in the four-sphere. This description is inspired by the work of Gay and Kirby on trisections of four-manifolds and extends the classical concept of bridge splittings of links in the…
These are the lecture notes for the introductory course on Whitehead, Reidemeister and Ray-Singer torsions, given by the author at the University of Zurich in Spring semester 2014.
This article surveys the Weierstrass representation of surfaces in the three- and four-dimensional spaces, with an emphasis on its relation to the Willmore functional. We also describe an application of this representation to constructing a…
To each link $L$ in $S^3$ we associate a collection of certain labelled directed trees, called width trees. We interpret some classical and new topological link invariants in terms of these width trees and show how the geometric structure…
Higher braiding gates, a new kind of quantum gate, are introduced. These are matrix solutions of the polyadic braid equations (which differ from the generalized Yang-Baxter equations). Such gates support a special kind of multi-qubit…
It has been common wisdom among mathematicians that Extended Topological Field Theory in dimensions higher than two is naturally formulated in terms of n-categories with n> 1. Recently the physical meaning of these higher categorical…
This article surveys invariants of four-manifolds and their relation to Donaldson-Witten theory, and other topologically twisted Yang-Mills theories. The article is written for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Physics,…