Around the Volume Conjecture


March 13 - 19, 2006
Columbia University
New York, NY


The works of Thurston and Jones revolutionized low dimensional topology. Thurston established the ubiquity of hyperbolic structure in low dimensions. Jones' work, via such physical notions as quantum groups and path integrals, led to vast families of topological invariants associated with diagrammatic descriptions of topological objects. This conference will focus on relationships between key geometric and quantum invariants, in particular on the generalized volume conjecture that relates the hyperbolic volume and Chern-Simons invariant, and the colored Jones polynomials of a knot.

Conference Program  and   abstracts

Participants include: Hua Bai, Stephane Baseilhac, Riccardo Benedetti, Francesco Costantino, Marc Culler, Charles Frohman, David Futer, Stavros Garoufalidis, Alexander Goncharov, Ryan Greene, Sergei Gukov, Zheng Hao, Johannes Härtel, Joanna Kania-Bartoszynska, Rinat Kashaev, Thang Le, Dean Leonardi, Weiping Li, Gregor Masbaum, Rob Meyerhoff, Jun Murakami, Yi Ni, Milena Pabiniak, Jozef Przytycki, Yongwu Rong, Radmila Sazdanovic, Alexander Shumakovitch, Adam Sikora, Dan Silver, Dylan Thurston, R.I. van der Veen, Susan Williams, Yoshiyuki Yokota

Registration: All interested participants should register by sending their name, address and affiliation to: volconf06@math.columbia.edu

Directions and accomodations: Directions to the mathematics department and some information about accomodations can be found here.

  • Teachers College Guest Housing.
  • Landmark Guest Rooms.
  • Milburn Hotel.

    Organizing Committee: Abhijit Champanerkar, Oliver Dasbach, Effie Kalfagianni, Ilya Kofman, Xiao-Song Lin, Walter Neumann, Neal Stoltzfus
    This conference is partially supported by a Focused Research Group grant from the NSF.

    Image credit: Anders Sandberg.