Rado Lecture - Vaughan Jones

Title: Lecture 2: Some unitary representations of R. Thompson's groups.

Speaker: Vaughan Jones (Vanderbilt University)

Abstract: Thompson’s groups $F$ and $T$ are certain groups of $PL$ homeomorphisms of the unit interval and the circle respectively. After describing them in some detail we will explain a very general way of constructing actions of these groups, a special case of which gives unitary representations on Hilbert space. The coefficients of these representations are interesting and give a way of constructing all knots and links from elements of $F$ (or $T$).

Upcoming Lectures

Lecture 3: On the continuum limit of a quantum spin chain (??)

Previous Lectures

Lecture 1: Some consequences of von Neumann dimension