Joint Colloquium: Tomoyuki Arakawa -- Moore-Tachikawa conjecture and chiral algebras of class S

Motivated by the string theory, Moore and Tachikawa conjectured in 2011 the existence of
two-dimensional topological quantum field theories associated with symplectic
varieties.  In my lecture I will talk about a possible solution to this conjecture via
vertex algebras which are a priori nothing to do with the conjecture.