Richard P. Stanley Seminar in Combinatorics: the HOMFLY polynomial of a forest…..

The HOMFLY polynomial of a link is a two-variable link invariant which was introduced in the 1980s. It can be defined recursively using a skein relation and specializes to other link invariants such as the Alexander polynomial and Jones polynomial. We will study this polynomial for plabic links, a class of links which are associated to plabic graphs. In particular, for a plabic graph whose quiver is an orientation of a forest, we will describe how to compute the HOMFLY polynomial of the associated link recursively in terms of the quiver and provide a closed form expression for it.

For information about the Richard P. Stanley Seminar in Combinatorics, visit… https://math.mit.edu/combin/