Learning Seminar on String Topology

This Fall quarter at Northwestern I'm co-organising (with Brian Williams) a learning seminar in string topology. Our goal is to learn about the string topology operations on the homology of a free loop space LM, and how they arise from a partially extended 2d TFT which assigns to a point either of the Calabi-Yau algebras Omega^*(M) or C_*(Omega M).

We'll meet twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10am in Lunt 102.

Schedule

References

• Blumberg, Cohen and Teleman, Open-Closed Field Theories, String Topology and Hochschild Homology
  (slides: http://org.uib.no/nordfjordeid/files/cohenlecture2.pdf)
• Chas and Sullivan, String Topology
• Cohen, Morse Theory, Graphs, and String Topology
• Cohen and Jones, A Homotopy Theoretic Realization of String Topology
• Cohen and Godin, A Polarized View of String Topology
• Cohen and Klein, Umkehr Maps
• Cohen, Klein and Sullivan, The Homotopy Invariance of the String Topology Loop Product and String Bracket
• Costello, Topological Conformal Field Theories and Calabi-Yau Categories
• Godin, Higher String Topology Operations
• Hain, Iterated Integrals and Algebraic Cycles: Examples and Prospects
• Harrelson, On the Homology of Open-Closed String Field Theory
• Lurie, On the Classification of Topological Field Theories
• Ramirez, Open-Closed String Topology via Fat Graphs

Participants