Kirchberg’s QWEP Conjecture: Between Connes’ and Tsirelson’s Problems

In January of this year, a solution to Connes' Embedding Problem was announced on arXiv. The paper itself deals firmly in the realm of information theory and relies on a vast network of implications built by many hands over many years to get from an efficient reduction of the so-called Halting problem back to the existence of finite von Neumann algebras that lack nice finite-dimensional approximations. The seminal link in this chain was forged by astonishing results of Kirchberg which showed that Connes' Embedding Problem is equivalent to what is now known as Kirchberg's QWEP Conjecture. In this talk, I aim to introduce Kirchberg's conjecture and to touch on some of the many deep insights in the theory surrounding it.