The Interface of Knots and Physics: American Mathematical Society Short Course January 2-3, 1995 San Francisco, California

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. The book features: a basic introduction to knot polynomials in relation to statistical link invariants; and, 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