Hot Topic Seminar, Herbst 2019, Donnerstags 16:30 - 18:00

Configuration spaces and Diffeomorphisms of manifolds

Oct. 10: Peter Teichner,

Introduction to configuration space integrals for knots and homology 3-spheres

Oct. 17: Sarah Blackwell and Jason Joseph,

Linking numbers and Gauss integrals

Oct. 31: Michael Klug and Aru Ray,

Casson's invariant via counting embedded Theta-graphs

Nov. 7: Peter Teichner,

Milnor invariants, Whitney towers and the Kontsevich integral

Nov. 14: David Reutter and Matt Young,

Chern-Simons theory

Nov. 21: David Gay and Ben Ruppik,

Fulton MacPherson compactifications

Nov. 28: Bertram Arnold,

Formality of the little disk operad

Dec. 12: Peter Teichner and Dave Gay,

Hairy graphs and mapping spaces between little disk operads

Dec. 19: Dave Gay and Danica Kosanovic,

New results for Diff(D^4)

Possible references include:

Tadayuki Watanabe

Some exotic nontrivial elements of the rational homotopy groups of Diff(S^4)

Benoit Fresse, Victor Turchin, Thomas Willwacher

The rational homotopy of mapping spaces of E_n operads

Dev Sinha:

Manifold-theoretic compactifications of configuration spaces

Pascal Lambrechts, Ismar Volic:

Formality of little disks

Christine Lescop:

An introduction to finite type invariants of knots and 3-manifolds defined by counting graph configurations

A formula for the Theta invariant from Heegaard diagram

Knot invariants derived from the equivariant linking pairing