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TQFTs do not detect the Milnor sphere

GEOMETRY AND QUANTUM THEORY

When: March 10, 2026
4:15 pm - 6:30 pm
Where: Science Center 507
Address: 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
Speaker: Lorenzo Riva (CMSA)

I will talk about the recent paper of Gripaios and Randall-Williams with that title, where they prove that a functorial TQFT (i.e. a symmetric monoidal functor from the n-dimensional bordism category into a suitably nice target category) assigns the same value to homotopy spheres that bound a parallelizable manifold, extending some no-go theorems of Reutter and Schommer-Pries.