Beschreibung:
There have been exciting developments in the area of knot theory in recent years. They include Thurston's work on geometric structures on 3-manifolds (e.g. knot complements), Gordon -- Luecke work on surgeries on knots, Jones' work on invariants of links in S3, and advances in the theory of invariants of 3-manifolds based on Jones- and Vassiliev-type invariants of links. Jones ideas and Thurston's idea are connected by the following path: hyperbolic structures, PSL(2, C) representations, character varieties, quantization of the coordinate ring of the variety to skein modules (i.e. Kauffman, bracket skein module), and finally quantum invariants of 3-manifolds. This proceedings volume cover all those exciting topics.
TQFT invariants at infinity for the Whitehead manifold, H. Abchir; new knot and link invariants, T. Fiedler and A. Stoimenov; the planar algebra of a bipartite graph, V.F.R. Jones; a survey of virtual knot theory, L. Kauffman; extended braids and links, R. Fenn and E. Keyman; Monte Carlo exploration of polygonal knot spaces, K.C. Millett; towards a complexity measure theory of vortex tangles, R.L. Ricca; virtual knot groups, D.S. Silver and S.G. Williams; periodic knots with delta-unknotting number one, Y. Uchida. (Part contents)