Introduction to categorification

Alistair Savage

Published 2014-01-23, updated 2015-01-12Version 2

These are the notes for a two-week mini-course given at a winter school in January 2014 as part of the thematic semester New Directions in Lie Theory at the Centre de Recherches Math\'ematiques in Montr\'eal. The goal of the course was to give an overview of the idea of categorification, with an emphasis on some examples where explicit computation is possible with minimal background. The notes begin with a very brief review of the representation theory of associative algebras, before introducing the concept of weak categorification with some simple examples. It then proceeds to a discussion of more sophisticated examples of categorification, including a weak categorification of the polynomial representation of the Weyl group and the Fock space representation of the Heisenberg algebra. The notes conclude with a discussion of strong categorification and a brief overview of some further directions in the field.