<<  News and Merit Report, 2009  >>

Why make it public? So painful it is to write, I must try to sweeten the pill by adding to it some residual benefit. Hence it is also a "news report" presented annually in the open to the small number of people who might be interested in what I'm up to. The sectioning follows the standard Faculty of Arts & Science form, but with many parts suppressed.

A. Teaching

1. Courses Taught

5. Other

• I have won the "Outstanding Teaching Award" of the Faculty of Arts and Science this year.
• I run a weekly lunchtime research-group meeting titled "Knot at Lunch''. See http://katlas.math.toronto.edu/drorbn/index.php?title=Knot_at_Lunch.

B. Research Supervisions

(i) Undergraduate

• Iva Halacheva worked on "Gauss diagram formulas for finite type knot invariants" in Summer (May-August) 2008 at 10 supervision hours per month.

(iii) New and Continuing PhD

(a) Primary supervisions.

• Karene Chu, working on "Virtual Braids" from May 2007 at 4 supervision hours per month.
• Zsuzsanna Dancso, working on "Kontsevich formalism for knotted trivalent graphs" from September 2006 at 4 supervision hours per month.
• Louis Leung, working on "Lie bialgebra weight systems" from September 2005 at 4 supervision hours per month.
• Jana Archibald, working on "Fermion formulas for Alexander" from September 2005 at 4 supervision hours per month.
• Peter Lee, working "Frozen feet associators, quadratic algebras" from May 2006 at 4 supervision hours per month.

(b) Supervisory committee memberships

(iv) Completed Graduate Theses/Degrees

• Hernando Burgos's title was The Jones Polynomial and the planar algebra of alternating links. Ph.D. awarded February 2009 (in Bogota), 8 supervision hours per month.

C. Scholarly Work in Progress

• Finite Type Invariants of w-Knotted Objects: From Alexander to Kashiwara and Vergne, no co-authors, first listed 2009, 35 pages written, anticipated completion December 2009 at 120 pages as an article/monograph.

F. Invited Lectures

• Projectivization, Welded Knots and Alekseev-Torossian, Oberwolfach, May 2008 (web page attached) and Geneva, May 2008.
• Local Khovanov Homology, Zurich Colloquium in Mathematics, May 2008 (web page and handout attached) and Geneva, May 2008.
• Non-Commutative Gaussian Elimination and Rubik's Cube, Canadian Undergraduate Mathematics Conference, July 2008 (web page and handout attached).
• Projectivization, W-Knots, Kashiwara-Vergne and Alekseev-Torossian, MSRI, August 2008 (web page and handout attached).
• The Penultimate Alexander Invariant, Sandbjerg (Aarhus University), October 2008 (web page and handout attached).
• Algebraic Knot Theory, Colloquium, Copenhagen University, October 2008 (handout attached).
• Disorganized Tidbits: Kashiwara-Vergne, Drinfel'd, Alekseev-Torossian, Alexander, Virtual knots, and Etingof-Kazhdan, Northeastern University, October 2008 (web page and handout attached).
• (u, v, and w knots) x (topology, combinatorics, low algebra, and high algebra), Colloquium, Penn State University, February 2009 (web page attached).
• Talks in Bogota, February 2009 (web page and handout attached).
• (u, v, and w knots) x (topology, combinatorics, low algebra, and high algebra), Twenty-Seventh Annual Friends of Mathematics Lecture, Kansas State University, April 2009 (poster and handout attached).
• The Hardest Math I've Ever Really Used, Kansas State University, April 2009 (handout attached).
• Convolutions on Lie Groups and Lie Algebras and Ribbon 2-Knots, Glasgow, April 2009 (canceled due to a winter illness, web page attached).

I. Grants and Contracts

• New and newer knot invariants, Discovery NSERC grant, starting April 2003 and ending March 2008 at total of $100,000 with no co-investigators.
• Knot Theory and Algebra, Discovery NSERC grant, starting April 2008 and ending March 2013 at total of $140,000 with no co-investigators.
• Knot Theory and Algebra, Discovery Accelerator Supplement (NSERC) starting April 2009 and ending March 2012 at total of $120,000 with no co-investigators.

J. Honours

L. External Professional Service

• Member of the Editorial Board, Compositio Mathematica.
• Founding editor of The Knot Atlas.
• Founding Contributor to KnotTheory`, a computer knot theory package.
• Member of the Electronic Services Committee of the Canadian Mathematical Society.
• Refereed 4 papers last year and 2 grant proposals.