UIC Graduate Student Seminar
Friday February 2, Friday February 9
3:00 pm
636 SEO
Speaker: Lou Kauffman
Title: Knot Theory, Physics and Natural Science
Abstract: These talks will discuss how the search for topological
invariants of knots in three dimensional space has led to a remarkable set
of relationships with the methods and ideas of statistical and quantum
physics. In the first talk we will introduce some basic knot theory and
show how it is connected with electricity and statistical mechanics. In the
second talk we'll advance to quantum field theory. In between we will find
out how knot theory is applied to study DNA.