PIMS/UBC Distinguished Colloquium: Ulrike Tillmann

Cobordisms have played an important role in the classification of manifolds through work of Rene Thom from the 1950s. In a different way, they are fundamental to the mathematical formulation for topological quantum field theory of Atiyah, Segal and Witten. For a long time these two theories did not seem to interact. We will explain how more recent results have unified the two.