This is an old course webpage

Math 235: Grid homology

Spring 2024

Instructor: Sucharit Sarkar.
Class: MWF 13:00-14:50, MS 5117.
Office hours: By appointment, MS 6909.

Syllabus: We will study grid homology, which is a homological invariant of knots and a categorification of the Alexander polynomial. It is a combinatorial reinterpretation of the famous knot Floer homology. You should be familiar with the basics of topology and algebra. Anything else that we need, we will cover them in class; so this can be your first course in low-dimensional topology, and can be a good learning opportunity for many modern mathematical techniques. We will follow the Grid Homology Book by Ozsvath-Stipsicz-Szabo, as well as some papers covering more recent developments.

Grading: Since this is a graduate topics course, there is no grading per se. However, for the undergraduate students attending the course and who will need a grade, their grade will be entirely based on attendance and HW which is due at the end of the quarter. The HW is the PDF below (which will be updated after every lecture) and involves working out the details that I skipped in class.
HW