University of Illinois at Chicago Quantum topology seminar Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 2PM in room 512 SEO. TITLE: Generalized duality for graphs on surfaces and its application to links. ABSTRACT: The natural duality of graphs embedded into a surface can be generalized to a duality with respect to a subset of edges. The dual graph might be embedded into a different surface. For graphs on surfaces there is a generalization of the classical Tutte polynomial called the Bollobas-Riordan polynomial. In this talk I will explain a relation between the signed Bollobas-Riordan polynomials of dual graphs. This relation unifies various recent Thistlethwaite's type results of expressing the Jones polynomial of (virtual) links as specializations of the Bollobas-Riordan polynomials.