Reflections on the theme of the poster. (English) Zbl 0817.57003

Bott, Raoul

Goldberg, Lisa R. (ed.) et al., Topological methods in modern mathematics. Proceedings of a symposium in honor of John Milnor’s sixtieth birthday, held at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA, June 14-June 21, 1991. Houston, TX: Publish or Perish, Inc. 125-135 (1993).

This is the text of a discursive talk given at the symposium in honour of Milnor’s sixtieth birthday. It discusses some of the modern developments and techniques in knot theory, such as the Kauffman bracket and the Turaev-Viro 3-manifold invariants, and points out ways in which they resemble earlier constructions, including work of Bott in 1950. It ends with some broad questions as the possible nature of the new manifold invariants.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 0780.00031].

Reviewer: H.R.Morton (Liverpool)

MSC:

57M25

Knots and links in the \(3\)-sphere (MSC2010)

Keywords:

Turaev-Viro invariant; Reidemeister torsion; Kauffman bracket