KNOTS IN HELLAS '98 - PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON KNOT THEORY AND ITS RAMIFICATIONS

There have been exciting developments in the area of knot theory in recent years. They include Thurston's work on geometric structures on 3-manifolds (e.g. knot complements), Gordon–Luecke 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 by the following path: hyperbolic structures, PSL(2,C) representations, character varieties, quantization of the coordinate ring of the variety to skein modules (i.e. Kauffman, bracket skein module), and finally quantum invariants of 3-manifolds. This proceedings volume covers all those exciting topics.