The Laboratory of Topology and Dynamics of the Novosibirsk State University organize the Conference on Physical Knotting, Vortices and Surgery in Nature, June 3 — August 27, 2020. The conference will be held remotely at Zoom. One 50-minute invited talk per week is planned.

The first talk will be held on Wednesday, June 3 at 10:00 PM by Chicago time (GMT-5), that is Thursday June 4 at 10:00 AM by Novosibirsk time (GMT+7).

By this event, we would like to highlight and promote some common faces of topology, fluid dynamics, condensed matter theory and other natural sciences, which jointly constitute the new interdisciplinary branch of mathematical physics, emerging at the edge of knot theory, physical knotting, vortices and surgery in nature. Besides the traditional fundamental topological issues, there exists a set of important, but much less studied problems dealing with various incarnations of the "physical knotting" problem in physics and biology.

A number of problems in statistical and condensed matter physics, as well as in biology have straightforward interpretation in terms of the topology of fluctuating extended one-dimensional objects embedded in surfaces or in 3D spaces. Abstract images of entangled random trajectories have a variety of manifestations and include knotted polymer chains, random walks, chaotic processes, topology of Feynman diagrams, Wilson loops in topological field theories etc.

From a physical perspective, emergence of extended topological objects leads to a bunch of new nonperturbative phenomena in soft matter, and in biopolymer statistics. The conference is aimed in communicating and exchanging the modern theoretical and numerical investigations carried out on low-dimensional topology in mathematics, fluid dynamics, condensed matter theory and other natural sciences. Our hope is that scientists from different fields, who might not ordinarily interact, will have an opportunity for cross-fertilization of ideas. The unifying strands, which tie together the event, are the generic cross-disciplinary methods, rather than the particular applications.

The main topics of the conference are tentatively split in the following subjects:

1. New general mathematical trends in low-dimensional topology
2. Topology in physics: from field theories to fluid dynamics
3. Statistical topology of biopolymers and beyond

During the conference public lectures of generic interest are expected.

Program committee

Sergey Alekseenko (Institute of Thermophysics and Novosibirsk State University, Russia)

Louis Kauffman (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA and Novosibirsk State University, Russia)

Iskander Taimanov (Novosibirsk State University, Russia)

Andrei Vesnin (Novosibirsk State University, Russia)

Organizing committee

Nikolay Abrosimov (Novosibirsk State University, Russia)

Meiramgul' Ermentay (Novosibirsk State University, Russia)

Andrei Vesnin (Novosibirsk State University, Russia)

If you would like to participate in the Conference and to join our Zoom sessions, please contact Nikolay Abrosimov (abrosimov@math.nsc.ru)