(joint IMPRS-Minicourse and Cobordism Hypothesis Seminar) Overview of the cobordism hypothesis

The cobordism hypothesis, conjectured by Baez-Dolan and proven by Lurie, provides a classification
of fully local topological field theories. In this talk we will describe an approach to proving the
cobordism hypothesis which closely follows Lurie's original sketch, but which also incorporates
some more recent simplifications.

This first overview talk is being jointly held with IMPRS, and will be more accessible. I will
assume that the audience is familiar with basic category theory, some parts of abstract homotopy
theory, and with smooth manifolds.

Subsequent talks will be more specialized and aimed at filling in as many details of the proof
as we can.