Distributive Structures in Knot Theory -- Krzysztof Putyra

In 1950's Ralph Fox defined a family of combinatorial link invariants that count special colorings of a link diagram. Later, in 1982 David Joyce observed that to define such colorings one needs only an operation on a set of colors which is (I) idempotent, (II) right-invertible and (III) right-distributive. He called such a structure a quandle. In the recent past, Scott Carter and Masahico Saito made another observation: colorings based on quandles satisfy a cocycle condition, what leaded to discovery of a homology theory for quandles. This has been soon defined for any distributive operation and even family of such operations, with the classical example of distributive lattices. In my talk I will describe different distributive structures that arises in knot theory, define its homology and show some properties. I will end with showing how to compute those homologies for any finite distributive lattice. The talk will be self-contained, but basic linear algebra is welcomed.