We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server end of 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
In recent years the interaction between geometic topology and classical and quantum field theories has attracted a great deal of attention from both the mathematicians and physicists.
We discuss some topics from low dimensional topology where this has led to new viewpoints as well as new results. They include categorification of knot polynomials and a special case of the gauge theory to string theory correspondence {in the Euclidean version of the theories,} where exact results are available.
We show how the Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev invariant in