Hello Everyone,
Right now I'm putting together some material on the slice-ribbon conjecture. My plan is to find some kind of survey paper on slice knots and knot cobordisms and spend the first session or two just sort of familiarizing ourselves with the problem and stuff that is known about it.
There are two big papers on the subject recently. One is the Gompf-Scharlemann-Thompson paper which exhibits a class of potential counter-examples to the conjecture, another is a paper by somebody else whose name I've forgotten which verifies the conjecture for all Montesinos knots. I'm thinking that it might be better to focus on the Gompf-etc paper because I find it distasteful to have to think about Montesinos knots. And besides, I really am hoping to sort of familiarize myself with more 4 dimensional type theory, and view the whole subject as sort of a natural bridge into 4-d topology for 3-manifold people like me.
So the tentative plan is that after the first two weeks of introduction, every week somebody covers some section of the Gompf-etc. paper thoroughly. The idea being that they even track down references and explain things in detail, so that all the attendant 4-manifold theory is sort of talked about as well. But I'm totally open to suggestions
Could everyone who's interested e-mail me the meeting times that work for them? Thanks. Also e-mail me with good ideas for making the seminar useful to everyone.
Best,
--Trent