Professor Alexander Voronov will speak on "The n-category of cobordisms and TQFTs"

This is a joint project with Mark Feshbach. The goal of the project is to find a suitable n-category framework for describing cobordisms with corners and topological quantum field theory as a functor from that higher category of cobordisms with corners to a higher category of vector spaces. The problem is quite old: almost every higher category theorist has it in the back of her head, but nobody seems to have gotten through to a satisfactory solution. In the talk, I will describe the set up we have found.