| School of Mathematical Sciences Colloquium Series | |
From group action to Kontsevich's
Swiss-Cheese conjecture through categorification
by
Dr Michael Batanin
Location: Mawson Lab G19
Date: Friday, 03 June
Time: 15:10
Abstract: The Kontsevich Swiss-Cheese conjecture is a deep generalization of the Deligne conjecture on Hochschild cochains which plays an important role in the deformation quantization theory. Categorification is a method of thinking about mathematics by replacing set theoretical concepts by some higher dimensional objects. Categorification is somewhat of an art because there is no exact recipe for doing this. It is, however, a very powerful method of understanding (and producing) many deep results starting from simple facts we learned as undergraduate students. In my talk I will explain how Kontsevich Swiss-Cheese conjecture can be easily understood as a special case of categorification of a very familiar statement: an action of a group G (more generally, a monoid) on a set X is the same as group homomorphism from G to the group of automorphisms of X (monoid of endomorphisms of X in the case of a monoid action).
The Colloquium will be followed by a reception for our speaker in
the Staff Tea Room with wine and nibbles to which all are invited.