February 28, 2023
Title: Diagram algebras and their homology (MI-talk)
Speaker: Guy Boyde
This talk will consist of:
- a friendly introduction to a certain (loosely defined) class of algebras, then
- a bit about why topologists care, and what we like to prove about them.
These algebras (the Temperley-Lieb and Brauer algebras, and various cousins) have already lead quite exciting lives in statistical physics and representation theory, and are of interest in topology because they look quite a lot like the group algebra of some symmetric group. This means that they are a really good place to study `homological stability' (whatever that is) because we understand this phenomenon really well for the symmetric groups.