This book is the result of an AMS Short Course on Knots and Physics that was held in San Francisco (January 1994). The range of the course went beyond knots to the study of invariants of low dimensional manifolds and extensions of this work to four manifolds and to higher dimensions. The authors use ideas and methods of mathematical physics to extract topological information about knots and manifolds.

Features:

• A basic introduction to knot polynomials in relation to statistical link invariants.
• Concise introductions to topological quantum field theories and to the role of knot theory in quantum gravity.

Knots and Physics would be an excellent supplement to a course on algebraic topology or a physics course on field theory.

Readership

Researchers and graduate students in mathematics and physics.

Table of Contents

• L. H. Kauffman -- Knots and statistical mechanics
• R. J. Lawrence -- An introduction to topological field theory
• D. Bar-Natan -- Vassiliev and quantum invariants of braids
• S. J. Lomonaco, Jr. -- The modern legacies of Thomson's atomic vortex theory in classical electrodynamics
• J. C. Baez -- Spin networks in nonperturbative quantum gravity