Jonathan Kujawa

The Vertex Research Group is a VErtical Research Team EXperience. Roughly modeled on the lab sciences, the group consists of undergraduate and graduate students working with myself on open research problems in mathematics. The goal is to provide an authentic research experience which culminates in articles which appear in research journals. Problems are chosen so that students with various backgrounds can all contribute substantially to the project.

For the 2009-2010 academic year, the Vertex group is using the Magma computer package to calculate Vassiliev knot invariants coming from low rank Lie algebras and Lie superalgebras. Currently only the very smallest examples (coming from sl(2) and gl(1|1)) admit a general recursive formula. Our goal is to devise similar recursive formulas for larger rank Lie (super)algebras.