Dror Bar-Natan: Classes: 2001-02:

Knots and Feynman Diagrams

Instructor: Dror Bar-Natan, drorbn@math.huji.ac.il, 02-658-4187.

Classes: Mondays 14:00-15:00 at Mathematics 110 and Thursdays 10:00-12:00 at Sprintzak 102.

Office hours: Mondays 15:00-15:45 in my office, Mathematics 309.

Agenda: To understand how path integrals and Feynman diagrams can lead to a very wide class of knot invariants.

Syllabus: Knots and links, all about linking numbers, all about self linking, framing and torsion, Gaussian integration, Abelian Chern-Simons theory, non-Abelian Chern-Simons theory, Faddeev-Popov and ghosts, BRST and supersymmetry, configuration space integrals, compactification of configuration spaces, the framing anomaly, finite type invariants and universality, directions of current research. I'm not committed to anything, don't sue me.

Prerequisites: Stokes' theorem for differential forms on manifolds with boundary.

Reading material:

By the week:

October 22, 25 Handout on Some Non Obvious Examples.
Handout on Differential Forms.
October 29, November 1 All about differential forms.
November 5, 8 University lecturer's strike.
November 12, 15 University lecturer's strike.
November 19, 22 University lecturer's strike.
November 26, 29 Nov. 26: University lecturer's strike.
Nov. 29: The strike finally ended! We'll have an out-of-sequence class about the Jones polynomial and Khovanov's Categorification.
December 3, 6  
December 10, 13  
December 17, 20 Some Hannukah Riddles.
December 24, 27 The Fulton-MacPherson Compactification: Compactification.pdf, Compactification.ps (updated Dec 9, 2002).
December 31, January 3 See L5.gif.
January 7, 10 See EmergenceOfFeynmanDiagrams.jpg.
See GraphCohomology.jpg.
January 14, 17  
January 21, 24 We had Lou Kauffman: See picture!
January 28, 31 See FaddeevPopovHandout.jpg and BerezinHandout.jpg.
February 4, 7  


At the Jerusalem Zoo. Are they forever linked?
Pensieve.