David Nelson Yetter (born 20 August 1957 Susquehanna Depot, Pennsylvania) is an American mathematician.
He received his B.S. in Mathematics from Dickinson College in 1979 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 under the direction of Peter J. Freyd. He was a Member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1986-87. His is currently a Professor of Mathematics at Kansas State University.
He is one of the discoverers of the HOMFLY polynomial[1]. Among his other results are a construction of braided monoidal categories from arbitrary Hopf algebras, the category of crossed bimodules, later renamed the Yetter-Drinfeld category of the Hopf algebra due to its equivalence in the case of finite dimensional Hopf algebras to the category of modules over Drinfel'd's quantum double; several combinatorial constructions of topological quantum field theories, the Crane-Yetter state-sum, a version of untwisted finite-gauge group Dijkgraaf-Witten theory with defects on a framed link, and an analogue of Dijkgraaf-Witten theory using a finite categorical group as initial data; and the construction of a weakly non-commutative version of Girard's linear logic admitting a universal semantics in quantales with a dualizing element satisfying a cyclicity property [2].
References
edit- ^ Freyd, P.; Yetter, D., Hoste, J., Lickorish, W.B.R., Millett, K., and Ocneanu, A. (1985). "A New Polynomial Invariant of Knots and Links". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 12 (2): 239–246. doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-1985-15361-3
- ^ Yetter, D.N., Quantales and (Noncommutative) Linear Logic The Journal of Symbolic Logic Vol. 55, No. 1 (Mar., 1990), pp. 41-64 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2274953