Vincent Florens (Brussels)
The braid groups were introduced by Artin to study knots and
links. A few years ago, Krammer used a representation
introduced by Lawrence to show that the braid groups are linear.
This answered to a long-standing problem.
Recently, Bigelow gave a very geometrical (topological) description of this representation. Moreover, he showed that this representation provides a new definition of the Jones polynomial, giving a very concrete interpretation of this important link invariant. |