Deliberately vague talk-blogging

I hope our readers haven’t been too expectant about awaiting talk blogging which has not been forth-coming. I’ve been in Europe for 3 and a half weeks now, and I think the general exhaustion of traveling is catching up to me.

This conference is set up to have 4 “major speakers” who give a series of 3 hour long lectures. These were originally supposed to be Khovanov, Seidel, Gukov and Ozsvath, but in an amazing stroke of bad luck, both of the first two canceled for health reasons (Paul Seidel did so two days before the start of the conference). Jake Rasmussen is pitch hitting for Khovanov, but they couldn’t find any replacement for Seidel on such short notice.

So, about those talks…

Peter’s been talking about knot Floer homology (what else?), mostly covering ground I’ve seen before in Dylan Thurston talks, but with enough different details that I’ve still been learning (not to mention that my grasp of knot Floer homology isn’t all that spectacular). I’m looking forward to tomorrow when he’s supposed to talk about the new cube of resolutions model of knot Floer homology. Perhaps I’ll be inspired enough to write something about.

Jake’s been talking about HOMFLY homology, mostly just covering the basics of it, which is beneficial for most of the audience, I’m sure (and helped to set up my talk), but hasn’t really told me much I didn’t already know, though his abstract promises some new stuff on torus knots tomorrow.

Sergei’s been talking about the tie-ins to Gromov-Witten theory and physics, which is enticing, but as usual, rather difficult to figure out the specifics of. I may write a little more about this stuff once I’d had a chance to bother him more about the relations of this to the GW=DT program. Does anyone out there in internet-land understand how the GW=DT conjecture relates to the expansion of quantum invariants in terms of finite type ones? I’m confused because Sergei seems to be saying the GW invariants are the quantum invariants in this picture, but looking the change of variables in GW=DT, I would have expected them to be the finite-type ones. Am I just being stupid?

Hopefully, I’ll eventually get around to saying something about my own talk, but that’ll have to wait until later.