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Graduate Student Geometry-Topology Seminar

Wednesday, March 4, 2009 - 1:00pm

Jen Hom

Penn

Location

University of Pennsylvania

3C6 DRLB

In 2003, Ozsvath and Szabo defined a knot invariant, \tau, using the knot filtration on the Heegaard Floer complex, and showed that \tau gives a lower bound on the 4-ball genus of the knot. In this talk, I will define \tau, state some of its properties, and use these properties to prove that the four ball genus of the (p, q) torus knot is (p-1)(q-1)/2 (a conjecture of Milnor, originally proved in 1993 by Kronheimer and Mrowka using Donaldson's invariants).