L3

Khovanov homology is an invariant of knots in $S^3$. In its original form,

it is a "homological version of the Jones polynomial"; Khovanov and

Rozansky have generalized it to other knot polynomials, including the

HOMFLY polynomial.

In the second talk, I'll discuss how Khovanov homology and its generalizations lead to a relation between the HOMFLY polynomial and the topology of flag varieties.

The space of smooth rational curves of degree d in projective space admits various moduli theoretic compactifications via GIT, stable maps, stable sheaves, Hilbert scheme and so on. I will discuss how these compactifications are related by explicit blow-ups and -downs for d

Parity games are simple two-player, infinite-move games particularly useful in Computer Science for modelling non-terminating reactive systems and recursive processes.  A longstanding open problem related to these games is whether the winner of a parity game can be decided in polynomial time.  One of the most promising algorithms to date is a strategy improvement algorithm of Voege and Jurdzinski, however no good bounds are known on its running time.

In this talk I will discuss how the problem of finding a winner in a parity game can be reduced to the problem of locally finding a global sink on an acyclic unique sink oriented hypercube.  As a consequence, we can improve (albeit only marginally) the bounds of the strategy improvement algorithm.

This talk is similar to one I presented at the InfoSys seminar in the Computing Laboratory in October.