Felix Wierstra: Vassiliev's method of studying the space of knots
Time: Fri 2013-09-20 13.15
Location: Room 306, building 6, Kräftriket, Department of mathematics, Stockholm university
In this presentation I shall give a general overview of Vassiliev's method of studying the space of all knots, (i.e. embeddings of S¹ in R³). The goal of Vassiliev's method is to calculate the cohomology of the space of all knots, this is done by studying the complement of the space of all knots within the space of all curves (i.e. the space of all immersions in R³). This complement which we will call the discriminant can be linked to the cohomology of the space of knots by using Alexander duality. In this presentation I shall explain how this all works and after this I shall briefly give some results that compare Vassiliev invariants to other knot invariants.