State-sum invariants of 3-manifolds associated to Artinian semisimple tortile categories (Q1330405)

The method of Turaev and Viro is generalized to construct state-sum invariants of 3-manifolds using an Artinian semisimple tortile category as initial data. Following Turaev and Viro, the author first constructs 3-manifold invariants and then handles the ``relative case'' to obtain TQFT's. In doing so, they isolate the analogies of the (classical or quantum) \(6j\)-symbols in any Artinian semisimple tortile category over an arbitrary field.