TETRAHEDRAL GEOMETRY/TOPOLOGY SEMINAR
ANNOUNCEMENT
DATE: Friday, December 5,
2008
LOCATION: Hempfield
High School, Room 213 (directions at http://www.millersville.edu/~tgts/)
followed by
dinner at a place to be determined.
4:30 TALK: James
Hughes, Elizabethtown College
"Link Homotopy Invariant Quandles: A
Cautionary Tale Concerning the "Obvious" Way to Define Something"
ABSTRACT: Racks
and quandles have been applied with some success to
the study of classical links.
Extending their
application to the study of link homotopy would seem
to be a straightforward procedure.
However, three
different approaches to defining a link homotopy
version of the fundamental quandle
yield
non-equivalent objects. In particular,
the seemingly "obvious" way to proceed (presented as such
by
the author in several venues, including TGTS!) turns out to have an obvious
flaw. The situation has
become
even more interesting since the "obvious" flaw in the
"obvious" definition was apparently not
obvious
at all to a certain referee.
EVERYONE WELCOME
PLEASE FORWARD THIS ANNOUNCEMENT TO ANYONE
INTERESTED
The Tetrahedral
Geometry/Topology Seminar is sponsored jointly by