Advances in Topological Quantum Field Theory

Book excerpt: This volume is the conference proceedings of the NATO ARW during August 2001 at Kananaskis Village, Canada on 'New Techniques in Topological Quantum Field Theory'. This conference brought together specialists from a number of different fields all related to Topological Quantum Field Theory. The theme of this conference was to attempt to find new methods in quantum topology from the interaction with specialists in these other fields. The featured articles include papers by V. Vassiliev on combinatorial formulas for cohomology of spaces of Knots, the computation of Ohtsuki series by N. Jacoby and R. Lawrence, and a paper by M. Asaeda and J. Przytycki on the torsion conjecture for Khovanov homology by Shumakovitch. Moreover, there are articles on more classical topics related to manifolds and braid groups by such well known authors as D. Rolfsen, H. Zieschang and F. Cohen.