Atypicality is a fundamental combinatorial invariant for simple supermodules
of a basic Lie superalgebra. Boe, Nakano, and the author gave a conjectural
geometric interpretation of atypicality via support varieties. Inspired by low
dimensional topology, Geer, Patureau-Mirand, and the author gave a
generalization of the Kac-Wakimoto atypicality conjecture. We prove both of
these conjectures for the Lie superalgebra osp(m|2n).
In this paper we use topological techniques to construct generalized trace
and modified dimension functions on ideals in certain ribbon categories.
Examples of such ribbon categories naturally arise in representation theory
where the usual trace and dimension functions are zero, but these generalized
trace and modified dimension functions are non-zero.