Tensor categories made from cobordisms

Hybrid. Contact: Christian Kaiser (kaiser@mpim...)

We will discuss several concrete categories whose structural operations, in particular, composition and tensor product, are given by easy topological manipulations involving cobordisms. Examples of such categories include Khovanov-Sazdanovic's cobordism categories and Deligne's interpolation categories. It turns out that, despite their simple topological definitions, these categories know about complicated representation theory, for instance, of finite groups or of Lie (super)groups.