Title:  How to untie a knot

Abstract:  How can you tell when a knot can be untangled?  This deceptively simple question is at the heart of Knot Theory, a field which emerged with the work of Vandermonde in the 18th century.  In this talk, we will introduce the knot classification problem, covering a few (but definitely not all) of the following ideas: knot invariants, Reidemeister moves, Conway and Jones polynomials, Gauss linking numbers, braid groups, Vassiliev invariants, the Kontsevich integral, Khovanov homology, categorification...