Integrating Braided Categories Over 3-Manifolds

Watch a mathematics lecture from the AQFT Lecture Series where Northwestern University's John Francis explores factorization homology and its application to creating invariants of framed 3-manifolds using rigid braided-monoidal categories with duals. Discover how this construction can be generalized to produce invariants of framed n-manifolds using E_{n-1}-monoidal categories with duals. Learn about the tangle hypothesis and how a dualizable object in an E_{n-1}-monoidal category uniquely determines a functor from the category of tangles in n-space. The presentation covers collaborative research conducted with David Ayala, offering deep insights into the intersection of category theory and manifold topology.