Mutant knots are notoriously hard to distinguish. Many, but not all, knot invariants take the same value on mutant pairs. Khovanov homology with coefficients in Z/2Z is known to be mutation-invariant, while the bigraded knot Floer homology groups can distinguish mutants such as the famous Kinoshita-Terasaka and Conway pair. However, Baldwin and Levine conjectured that…

During the last thirty years, several (families of) functionals have been defined which model self-avoidance: their values tend to infinity if an embedded object degenerates, e.g., if a sequence of closed simple curves converges to a curve with a self-intersection. Many of these functionals exhibit regularizing effects: they not only ensure embeddedness but in fact…

Let G denote a finite group and X a CW-complex. A homotopy group action is defined as a homotopy class of maps BG -- BAut(X). In this talk we will analyze these actions using techniques from group cohomology. We will show how they relate to geometric actions and how they can be used to construct…

Given a link diagram L, one can apply a Skein relation to each crossing to yield a cube of resolutions. These skein relations come from the braiding in the category of Uq(sln) representations. When n2, we have the Khovanov cube of resolutions with edge maps defined by (co)pants conordisms. We may then apply a smooth…

We give a brief overview of factorization homology theory due to Ayala, Francis and Tanaka and explain how it leads to a (still mostly conjectural) generalization of graph homology to homotopy commutative algebras, and an efficient computation of knot invariants coming from factorization homology (at least for alternating links).