Mitchell Messmore
Biography
A skein module is an algebraic device that stores the data of how a circle can be knotted in an ambient 3-dimensional space. For most spaces,the corresponding skein modules are too large and complex to compute explicitly, so we settle for describing their invariant features. In this thesis, we apply tools from homological algebra to better understand torsion properties of skein modules. In the process, we derive an invariant of the ambient 3-dimensional space.