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The Extension of "Topological-Style" Link Invariants to Tangles
by
John Armstrong
Yale University
Classical link invariants can be roughly divided into two classes - those which arise from combinatorial analyses of link diagrams and those which arise from the topology of the link embedding. This shows up in two distinct techniques for extending invariants to functors on categories of tangles.
This talk discusses the "topological-style" invariants, including the link group and the quandle of a link. The construction realizes the 2-category of tangles in a 2-category of cospans, as introduced by Bénabou, and seems to generalize to many other invariants of this type.
Date received: April 11, 2006
Copyright © 2006 by the author(s). The author(s) of this work and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Topology Atlas. Document # casv-04.