KNOTS AS POSSIBLE EXCITATIONS OF THE QUANTUM YANG-MILLS FIELDS

It is a great honour and pleasure for me to participate in the conference, dedicated to 85 years celebration for Professor C. N. Yang.

The influence of C. N. Yang on my own research is very strong. Two of my directions — quantization of the Yang-Mills field and theory of solitons stem from his works. I am proud to remind, that the term "Yang-Baxter equation" was introduced by L. Takhtajan and me and now covers extensive research in integrable models and quantum groups.

In my talk I shall describe the subject, which to some extend connects solitons and Yang-Mills quantum field theory. As is reflected in the title, it is still not well established. However, I believe, that work on it will be continued in the future.