Thursday, February 9th, 2012
9:30am - 10:30am, in Campus Center 2-2545

Emily Peters

MIT

The classification of subfactors

Abstract: Subfactors are objects from operator algebras which turn out to have interesting connections to other fields, such as knot theory and tensor categories. Here we are interested in classifying subfactors. They have a real-number invariant, called the Jones index. Classification up to index 4 has been known for a while. I will talk about a program to push this up to index 5, and perhaps beyond. This is joint work with Morrison, Snyder and Penneys. No familiarity with subfactors will be assumed.