THE Second ANNOUNCEMENT, January 15, 2005
KNOTS IN WASHINGTON XX; 60th birthday of Louis H. Kauffman
 February 11-13, 2005
        The 20th Conference on Knot Theory and its Ramifications
George Washington University, Washington, DC


You are cordially invited to attend our Knots in Washington XX conference.

Conference is devoted to topics in Knot Theory and its Ramifications
which were introduced, discovered, studied or popularized by Louis H. Kauffman.

Plenary speakers include: Dror Bar-Natan, Mikhail Khovanov, Hugh Morton, Kunio Murasugi, David Radford, Oleg Viro.
This regional conference is held every semester, in various locations in the Washington area
(see the main KIW page ).

The conference will take place at George Washington University.

We plan five plenary talks - 50 minutes long, and 20 minutes long research talks.

You are cordially invited to participate in this and future meetings.

We will start on Friday February 11, 1:00 pm with the talk by Louis H. Kauffman.
It will take place in the room 113 of the bulding 1957 E street (GWU).

If you plan to attend please contact one of the organizers. No registration fee! 

If you give a talk please submit your abstract at SUBMISSION -- Knots in Washington XX

The viewing page is at Abstracts -- Knots in Washington XX

Speakers include:
S.Carter, I.Darcy, O.Dasbach, D.De Wit, J.Drobotukhina, A.Durfee, H.Dye, S.Garoufalidis, L.Helme-Guizon, C-C.Hsieh, G.T.Jin, P.Kainen, U.Kaiser, K.Kawamuro, S.Lambropoulou, R.Lawrence, T.Le, X-S.Lin, H.H.Moser, J.H.Przytycki, Y.Rong, M.Saito, S.Satoh, A.Shumakovitch, D.Silver, F.J. O. Souza, S.Williams, D.Yetter,...

See directions to GWU below

Schedule:

Friday, February 11, 2005
Talks at 1957 E street, room 113
1:00 -- 1:50 Lou Kauffman (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Spin Networks and Anyonic Topological Quantum Computing
2:00 -- 2:40 David Radford (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Some generalizations of quasitriangular Hopf algebras which give rise to invariants of knots and links
2:50 -3:10 Stavros Garoufalidis (Georgia Tech.)
On the Generalized Hyperbolic Volume Conjecture
3:10 -- 3:30 coffee break
3:30 -- 3:50 Oliver Dasbach (LSU.)
On Kauffman's spanning tree expansion of the Alexander polynomial
4:00 -- 4:20 Xiao-Song Lin (U.C. Riverside)
On n-punctured ball tangles
4:30 -- 5:00 Scott Carter (U. South Alabama), Masahico Saito (USF)
Fox colorings for the number of Reidemeister moves and colored chirality
5:10 -- 5:30 David De Wit (University of Queensland)
How the Links-Gould invariants generalise the Alexander-Conway polynomial
5:35 -- 5:55 Laure Helme-Guizon and Yongwu Rong (GWU)
A Khovanov-type homology theory for graphs
6:05 -- 6:25 Shin Satoh (Chiba University and U. South Florida)
Disk presentations of surface-knots and -links
6:30 -- 6:50 Julia Viro-Drobotukhina (Uppsala Univ.)
Lines and circles meeting links
7:00 -- 7:10 Alan Durfee (Mount Holyoke College)
Polynomial and Rational knots

Saturday February 12, 2005
ROME building (22 Street), room 459
10:00 -- 10:30am Breakfast: coffee and refreshments
10:30 -- 11:20am Hugh Morton (U. Liverpool)
The meridian maps in skein theory
11:30 -- 11:50 Sofia Lambropoulou (NTUA, Greece and Univ. de Caen, France)
Virtual braids and the L-move
12:00 -- 12:30 Oleg Viro (Uppsala Univ.)
Khovanov homology of virtual knots
12:40 -- 12:45 Joan Birman (Columbia Univ.)
Short introduction to the talk:
12:45 -- 13:00 Harriet H. Moser (Columbia Univ.)
A method to prove that a manifold has a complete hyperbolic structure

13:00 -- 2:00 pm LUNCH/Pizza at Rome
2:00 - 2:50 Mikhail Khovanov (UC Davis)
Categorification of the Kauffman bracket and equivariant cohomology
3:00 -- 3:20 Thang Le (G. Tech)
On the Kauffman bracket skein modules, the Jones polynomial and the A-polynomial
3:20 -- 3:50 coffee break
3:50 -- 4:10 Alexander Shumakovitch (Dartmouth College)
Rasmussen Invariant, Slice-Bennequin Inequality, and Sliceness of Knots
4:20 -- 5:00 Dan Silver, Susan Williams (Univ. South Alabama)
Alexander groups of long virtual knots
5:10 -- 5:40 Uwe Kaiser (Boise State U.)
Generalization of a formula of Przytycki
5:50 -- 6:10 Sostenes Lins (Depto. Matematica UFPE/CNPq (Brazil))
Blobs and Flips on Gems
6:20 -- 6:40 Gyo Taek Jin (KAIST, Korea)
Quadrisecants and quadrisecant approximations of knots

7:00pm A small party at Jozef's house

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Talks take place in ROME building, room 459
10:00 -- 10:30am Breakfast: coffee and refreshments
10:30 -- 11:20am Dror Bar-Natan (U. Toronto)
I've computed Kh(T(9,5)) and I'm happy
11:30 -- 11:50 Ruth Lawrence (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
The slope conjecture for surgery around knots
11:55 -- 12:15 Isabel K. Darcy (U.Iowa)
3-string tangle analysis of Mu transposase
12:20 -- 12:40 Paul Kainen (Georgetown University)
Robust bases and transformations of knotted cycles
12:45 - 1:05 Fernando J. O. Souza (University of Iowa)
On non-additive versions of the Kauffman-Radford reformulation of the Hennings invariant (KRH invariant)

1:05 -- 2:00 LUNCH/Pizza at Rome building

2:00 -- 2:50 Kunio Murasugi (University of Toronto)
The twisted Alexander polynomials
3:00 -- 3:20 Chun-Chung Hsieh (CCVAX, TW)
Linking in knot theory
3:30 -- 3:50 David Yetter (K.S.U)
Non-linear Finite-Type Invariants
4:00 -- 4:20 Jozef H. Przytycki (GWU)
Survey on the Kauffman bracket skein modules of 3-manifolds
4:30 -- 4:50 Heather A. Dye (US Military Academy)
Realizations of Virtual Link Diagrams

5:00pm Official end of the conference.

Directions to George Washington University:
http://www.gwu.edu/~map/
The reasonable hotels in the neighborhood are
State Plaza Hotel (2117 E St)
http://www.washington-dc-hotel.us/state-plaza-hotel.php
or Holiday Inn Rosslyn:
http://www.basshotels.com/h/d/hi/hc/waswp
For the hotels around Washington see:
http://www.180096hotel.com/cgi-bin/pickinput?SID=YDL&LKF=YDL&Dest=WAS

For Hotels in Bethesda see:
http://travel.yahoo.com/p-hotel-476388-bethesda_hotels-i

Conference Organizers:
Sofia Lambropoulou (National Technical University of Athens and Univ. de Caen), sofia@math.ntua.gr
Jozef H. Przytycki (GWU), przytyck@gwu.edu
Yongwu Rong (GWU), rong@gwu.edu



The next conference, Knots in Washington XXI,
will take place in Fall of 2005,