TBA

A d-dimensional TQFT is a topological invariant which assigns (d-1)-dimensional manifolds to vector spaces and d-dimensional cobordisms to linear maps. In the early 90s, Reshetikhin and Turaev constructed examples of these in the case d=3, using the data of certain types of linear categories. In this talk, I will provide an overview of this construction, and then explore how this might be meaningfully extended downwards to assign 1-manifolds to "2-vector spaces". Minimal knowledge of category theory assumed!

An important invariant in the complex representation theory of reductive p-adic groups is the wavefront set, because it contains information about the character of such a representation. In this talk, Mick Gielen will introduce a new invariant called the canonical dimension, which can be said to measure the size of a representation and which has a close relation to the wavefront set.  He will then state some results he has obtained about the canonical dimensions of compactly induced representations and show how they teach us something new about the wavefront set. This illustrates a completely new approach to studying the wavefront set, because the methods used to obtain these results are very different from the ones usually used.