Hello all, The next MaPSS talk of this semester will be at 17:00 on Mon 3rd September in Carslaw 535. It’s a great opportunity to meet fellow postgrads, listen to an interesting talk, and of course get free food! ************************************************************************************** Speaker: Hazel Browne Title: Singular Knots and Finite Type Invariants Abstract: Does the question of how to tell knots apart keep you awake at night? Have you ever wondered whether a lot of the common knot invariants can be better understood when considering their values on resolutions of singular knots? If so, Finite Type Invariants may be just what you need. In this talk, we will introduce singular knots and explain how they give a filtration on the vector space spanned by knots. We will use this to give a definition of Finite Type Invariants and look at a few examples. Finally, we will explain how we can construct Finite Type Invariants using Lie algebraic information. ************************************************************************************** See you there! Details can also be found on the school’s new Postgraduate Society website: http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/MaPS/mapss.html Cheers, Alex