The geometric cobordism hypothesis

Thursday, October 28, 2021 - 11:00

Zoom Meeting ID: 973 0230 7263

Speaker Information
Daniel Grady
Texas Tech University

Abstract or Additional Information

The cobordism hypothesis of Baez--Dolan, whose proof was sketched by Lurie, provides a beautiful classification of topological field theories: for every fully dualizable object in a symmetric monoidal (infinity,d) category, there is a unique (up to a contractible choice) topological field theory whose value at the point coincides with this object. As beautiful as this classification is, it fails to include non-topological field theories. Such theories are important not just in physics, but also in pure mathematics (for example, Yang-Mills). In this talk, I will survey recent work with Dmitri Pavlov, which proves a geometric enhancement of the cobordism hypothesis. In the special case of topological structures, our theorem reduces to the first complete proof of the topological cobordism hypothesis, after the 2009 sketch of Lurie.