Symmetries: from groups to tensor categories
Organizers
Speaker
Alexei Davydov
Time
Wednesday, March 12, 2025 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Venue
A6-101
Online
Zoom 388 528 9728
(BIMSA)
Abstract
Groups are mathematical ways of talking about symmetries. From its beginning Group Theory was driven by the idea of symmetry and its applications (e.g. Galois' proof of unsolvability of a quintic). One of the most spectacular applications of Group Theory was the classification of crystals achieved at the end of the 19th century. In the middle of the 20th century Group Theory was used to describe all known states of matter. Experimental developments in the condensed matter physics at the end of the 20th century were not fitting the standard Group Theory scheme. They forced us to generalise the mathematical formulation of symmetry.
The talk will introduce this general notion, the one of tensor category.
The talk will introduce this general notion, the one of tensor category.
Speaker Intro
Professor Alexei Davydov got his PhD from Moscow University 1992, and worked at Moscow University as assistant professor from 1990 to 1998. After working at National University of Singapore, Macquarie University and Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, he became a visiting professor at University of New Hampshire. Professor Davydov have been working at Ohio University since 2012, and became a professor there since 2019. Professor Davydov is interested in algebra, representation theory and their connections to mathematical physics, specializing in Hopf algebras, quantum groups, tensor categories and their applications in conformal field theory.