URegina Topology Seminar: Matthew Alexander

When the same topic appears in both mathematics and physics, there are often stark differences between how that topic is conceptualized and studied in each discipline. In this talk we will examine what it means to a physicist for a field theory to be 'topological' and how to translate that information into the more familiar language of a functor on a cobordism category.

In particular we will see how TQFTs are natural models for describing quantum gravity in low dimensions.