Knots at Hellas 98: Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowt Theory and Its Ramifications 1st Edition

There were many developments in the area of knot theory in the 1990s. They include Thurston's work on geometric structures on 3-manifolds (such as knot complements), Gordon-Luecke's work on surgeries on knots, Jones' work on invariants of links in S3, and advances in the theory of invariants of 3-manifolds based on Jones- and Vassiliev-type invariants of links. Jones' ideas and Thurston's idea are connected with the following path: hyperbolic structures, PSL(2,C) representations, character varieties, quantization of the co-ordinate ring of the variety to skein modules (such as Kauffman, bracket skein module), and finally quantum invariants of 3-manifolds. This proceedings volume covers all those topics.