Combinatorial structures that compose and decompose give rise to Hopf monoids in Joyal's category of species. The Hadamard product of two Hopf monoids is another Hopf monoid. We prove two main results regarding freeness of Hadamard products. The first one states that if one factor is connected and the other is free as a monoid, their Hadamard product is free (and connected). The second provides an explicit basis for the Hadamard product when both factors are free. The first main result is obtained by showing the existence of a one-parameter deformation of the comonoid structure and appealing to a rigidity result of Loday and Ronco that applies when the parameter is set to zero. To obtain the second result, we introduce an operation on species that is intertwined by the free monoid functor with the Hadamard product. As an application of the first result, we deduce that the Boolean transform of the dimension sequence of a connected Hopf monoid is nonnegative.

Following Radford's proof of Lagrange's theorem for pointed Hopf algebras, we prove Lagrange's theorem for Hopf monoids in the category of connected species. As a corollary, we obtain necessary conditions for a given subspecies $\mathbf k$ of a Hopf monoid $\mathbf h$ to be a Hopf submonoid: the quotient of any one of the generating series of $\mathbf h$ by the corresponding generating series of $\mathbf k$ must have nonnegative coefficients. Other corollaries include a necessary condition for a sequence of nonnegative integers to be the dimension sequence of a Hopf monoid in the form of certain polynomial inequalities, and of a set-theoretic Hopf monoid in the form of certain linear inequalities. The latter express that the binomial transform of the sequence must be nonnegative.

We show that the bicategory of (representable) orbifolds and good maps is equivalent to the bicategory of orbifold translation groupoids and generalized equivariant maps, giving a mechanism for transferring results from equivariant homotopy theory to the orbifold category. As an application, we use this result to define orbifold versions of a couple of equivariant cohomology theories: K-theory and Bredon cohomology for certain coefficient diagrams.

We develop an explicit skein-theoretical algorithm to compute the Alexander polynomial of a 3-manifold from a surgery presentation employing the methods used in the construction of quantum invariants of 3-manifolds. As a prerequisite we establish and prove a rather unexpected equivalence between the topological quantum field theory constructed by Frohman and Nicas using the homology of $U(1)$-representation varieties on the one side and the combinatorially constructed Hennings TQFT based on the quasitriangular Hopf algebra $\mathcal{N} = \mathbb{Z}/2 \ltimes \bigwedge^* \mathbb{R}^2$ on the other side. We find that both TQFT's are $\SL (2,\mathbb{R})$-equivariant functors and, as such, are isomorphic. The $\SL (2,\mathbb{R})$-action in the Hennings construction comes from the natural action on $\mathcal{N}$ and in the case of the Frohman--Nicas theory from the Hard--Lefschetz decomposition of the $U(1)$-moduli spaces given that they are naturally K\"ahler. The irreducible components of this TQFT, corresponding to simple representations of $\SL(2,\mathbb{Z})$ and $\Sp(2g,\mathbb{Z})$, thus yield a large family of homological TQFT's by taking sums and products. We give several examples of TQFT's and invariants that appear to fit into this family, such as Milnor and Reidemeister Torsion, Seiberg--Witten theories, Casson type theories for homology circles {\it \`a la} Donaldson, higher rank gauge theories following Frohman and Nicas, and the $\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z}$ reductions of Reshetikhin--Turaev theories over the cyclotomic integers $\mathbb{Z} [\zeta_p]$. We also conjecture that the Hennings TQFT for quantum-$\mathfrak{sl}_2$ is the product of the Reshetikhin--Turaev TQFT and such a homological TQFT.