Liam Watson | PIMS - Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences

University of British Columbia

Liam Watson is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at UBC, with a research focus on Low Dimensional Topology. Dr. Watson received his PhD in 2009, from the University of Quebec at Montreal (and is also an alum of UBC). Watson had won teaching awards from UBC, the University of Glasgow and UCLA; held a tier 2 Canada Research Chair award, and a CRM-Simons professorship. Dr. Watson's research and distinctive partnership with other topologists has resulted in a successful PIMS Collaborative Research Group Award.

Khovanov homology gives rise to a simple invariant of knots and links taking values in the positive integers. Referred to as the width of a link, this invariant is a measurement of the homology's support. In general this quantity is not very well...

Abstract: L-spaces are 3-manifolds with simplest possible Heegaard Floer homology. These arise naturally in many applications of Heegaard Floer theory, and as a result it has been asked if there is an alternate characterization of this class of 3...

The symmetry group of a knot in the three-sphere is the mapping class group of the knot’s exterior. Elements of order two with fixed point set meeting the boundary of the knot exterior are called strong inversions, and a pair (K,h) is called a...

Mutation is a process that makes a non-trivial local change to a knot; the distinction between the resulting pair of knots is difficult to detect. I will present a vaguely historical account of why mutant pairs are difficult to distinguish. This will...

Abstract : Khovanov homology, though relatively young, is difficult to survey in an hour. This talk will nevertheless attempt to do so, by focussing on the problem of characterizing thin links—those links with simplest-possible Khovanov homology...

Khovanov homology, though relatively young, is difficult to survey in an hour. This talk will nevertheless attempt to do so, by focussing on the problem of characterizing thin links—those links with simplest-possible Khovanov homology. This is a...