In this talk we will review Witten’s work on understanding knot invariants based on Chern-Simons theory. We will first introduce the physics observables in Chern-Simons theory which correspond to knot invariants and talk about why they are topological invariants. After a short introduction about the quantization of Chern-Simons theory, we will review how to understand skein relations and surgery on links through the study of Hilbert space of WZW model on certain Riemann surfaces.

Organizer：Zhengwei Liu (BIMSA& THU)、Yilong Wang、Jinsong Wu (BIMSA)