Theo Johnson-Freyd

Not all quadratic equations admit solutions over the real numbers: You need to adjoin a square root of -1. Quite remarkably, once you do this, then *every* polynomial has a solution. I will explain a sense in which the category Vec_C also does not...

AKSZ Theory is a topological version of the Sigma Model in quantum field theory, and includes many of the most important topological field theories. I will present two generalizations of the usual AKSZ construction. The first is closely related to...

The usual Atiyah--Segal "functorial" description of quantum field theory corresponds to the "Schrodinger picture" in quantum mechanics. I will describe a slight modification that corresponds to the "Heisenberg picture", which I will argue is better...