Cobordism and Topological Field Theories Week 3
Posted by Alexander Hoffnung
Welcome to week 3 of the cobordism and TFT seminar at UCR. The previous lecture by Julie Bergner can be found here. There she talked about categories of cobordisms.
In the present lecture, Julie introduces symmetric monoidal categories and defines a notion of topological field theory.
To keep everyone apprised of the state of this seminar, I should say that in “real time” we are about to hit week 9. In “blog time” we are still not caught up, but I am sure we will get there soon. The nice thing is that I can give you a preview of the weeks to come below the fold.
Here is lecture 3. Enjoy and please keep the great comments coming. Although these notes are taking some time to hit the blog, they are coming to you with very little polishing. So it would be nice at some point to go back in and fill in details as well as add any relevant commentary from the blog.
A glimpse into the future: Weeks 4 and 5 (coming soon) are lectures by Chris Carlson and John Huerta, respectively. Chris talks about topological field theories in low dimensions and John gives a short history of the interaction between quantum field theory and topology.