Peter Samuelson (Riverside)
Abstract
Skein relations originally arose as a combinatorial/diagrammatic construction of knot invariants such as the Jones polynomial. In this talk I discuss some ways these relations appear in representation theory, including R-matrices for quantum groups, Hall algebras (of the type A quiver and an elliptic curve), and Khovanov's Heisenberg category. This will be a survey-style talk and won't assume prior knowledge of the objects mentioned above.