Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing

Higher Order Linking Numbers

Student-Run Geometry/Topology Seminar

Speaker: Miriam Kuzbary, Rice University
Related Webpage: http://math.rice.edu/~mk29/
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Tue, Oct 23 2018, 11:00AM

In this introductory talk I will outline the general landscape of Milnor’s invariants for links. First introduced in Milnor’s master’s thesis in 1954, these invariants capture fundamental information about links and have remained a fascinating object of study throughout the past half century. In the early 80s, Turaev and Porter independently proved their long-conjectured correspondence with Massey products of the link complement and in 1990, Tim Cochran introduced a beautiful construction to compute them using intersection theory. I will give an overview of these constructions and motivate the importance of these invariants, particularly for the study of links considered up to concordance.