Knots, Lattices and then Separation of Variables

The end of day two. In a change of plans I joined the tired-out club last night and lounged around in the JCR, so I was up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning to hear the first of today's three talks. Terry Gannon was speaking under the title of "What knots can still teach R(ational)CFT", and although the talk commenced with the trefoil knot, for the mostpart the focus was on modular forms and the braid group. He did a good job of persuading the audience that it was a good idea to lift the action of modular forms from the upper half plane to a Lie group, and that when considering a modular form with a non-integer weight that it was useful to use B_3 (a braid group) as oppose to Sl_2(Z).

During the morning break and throughout the day we were given the opportunity to purchase some text books with a 20% discount, so after my switch card was not accepted (the salesman didn't have the facility to process it) I raised £28 pounds from my friends and purchased a copy of "Affine Lie Algebras and Quantum Groups..." by Jurgen Fuchs. There were very many other good books available too (including paperback copies of Polchinski vols 1 and 2) and one I hadn't heard about before, but which I will look up in the library, called "Gravity and Strings" by Tomas Ortin.

This afternoon's first talk was about lattice gauge theory and was given by Fedor Smirnov, his title was "Correlation functions for lattice exactly solvable models", and the second was by Evgeni Sklyanin and entitled "The Q operator, Bäcklund transformation and separation of variables".

It seems that all the talks so far have been recorded, so hopefully will appear online at some point in the future. Tonight's aims are nothing more complex than getting some sleep and having a pleasant conversation or two, although not in that order.