Time and place: 9/9 at Science Center (1 Oxford Street), room 507.
Speaker: Lorenzo Riva
Title: Higher categories of cobordisms
Abstract: I will give a brief introduction to topological field theories from a higher categorical perspective. After saying a few things about higher categories, I will define a family of n-categories of bordisms and talk about their universal properties. I will try to squeeze in the canonical example -- representations of the 2-dimensional oriented bordism 2-category are separable symmetric Frobenius algebras -- and, time permitting, talk about my current work.