4-DIMENSIONAL 2-HANDLEBODIES AND TOPOLOGICAL INVARIANTS

This document forms the basis for the new work of my Master’s thesis. It will
be combined with my undergraduate thesis to form a more complete path for the
undergraduate reader. The first three sections constitute my undergraduate thesis to
make this a more complete document. The purpose of this thesis is to study the paper
Beliakova and De Renzi 2021 and explain how they construct a topological invariant
of a special class of 4-manifolds using the category of representations of certain Hopf
algebras.