TOPOLOGY SEMINAR

3/31/2005

Jacob Rasmussen

Princeton University

Deformations of the Khovanov Homology

The Khovanov homology is a homological generalization of the Jones polynomial. The technique of deforming the definition of this theory was introduced by Lee and studied in the sl(n) case by Gornik. It has proven to be a very powerful one. In this talk I'll describe the space of possible deformations, and give some applications, both to computing the sl(n) theory and to better understanding its structure.