Xavier Bressaud
A normal form for braids.

In this talk I will present a seemingly new normal form for braids.
Every braid is expressed using  a word in a regular language on some
simple alphabet of elementary braids. After a combinatorial presentation
of the normal form, I will show how it was inspired by a more
geometrical point of view (related to the strategy of relaxing curve
diagrams) and present a natural (tetris-like) algorithm  well suited for
computations.