A geometrical viewpoint on the Lawrence-Krammer representation of Artin's braid group


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.


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