This reading group meets roughly once a month for talks by visiting scholars, presentations of current research by group members, or discussions of recent publications in the philosophy of physics.  Meetings take place roughly once per month, in the philosophy department at UIC.

For more information, please email Brandon Fogel at this address: me at brandonfogel dot net.

Abstract: This talk will discuss relationships between topology and quantum mechanics that are relevant to quantum information and quantum computation.  We will discuss teleportation from a topological point of view, entanglement in the frameworks of topological entanglement (knotting and linking) and quantum entanglement, quantum knots, unitary representations of the Artin braid group that can perform universal quantum computation, and algorithms for computing knot invariants such as the Jones polynomial.  Many of these constructions lead to questions and speculations about the nature of quantum mechanics.