Have you ever felt that you just barely don’t understood something? That’s how I feel with instatons. Haowu’s talk cleared up some issues on the matter. Why people care about them, for example, confused me as well as the notion of a topological solution. But being that they work in a region where perturbation theory breaks down, I can see the motivation. It’s cool that they’re also related to the third homotopy of S^3, which was kind of in his talk.
As for my favorite, I have to pick Nick’s just for the breadth of math that went into it. Dolbeault cohomlogies are like DeRham cohomologies but over complex manifolds, but much harder (to me) to play with. I didn’t retain much new from his talk, but the fact that he was able to compute anything from that is sweet.
Nick
April 17, 2018 — 00:04
I missed the connection of instants to \Pi_3(S^3)! What this weeks round of talks has lead me to understand is that my understanding of Homotopy and it’s role in physics is woefully lacking.
Dolbeault cohomology groups are a bit harder, but they’re super useful in string theory. Especially when you start looking at certain variations of mirror symmetry, which is a big topic and I’m not even close to understanding how it works.