- Series
- Geometry Topology Student Seminar
- Time
- Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - 2:05pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 006
- Speaker
- Jonathan Paprocki – Georgia Tech
- Organizer
- Jonathan Paprocki
Solutions to the Yang-Baxter equation are one source of representations of the braid group. Solutions are difficult to find in general, but one systematic method to find some of them is via the theory of quantum groups. In this talk, we will introduce the Yang-Baxter equation, braided bialgebras, and the quantum group U_q(sl_2). Then we will see how to obtain the Burau and Lawrence-Krammer representations of the braid group as summands of natural representations of U_q(sl_2).