English

Doodles and commutator identities

Geometric Topology 2021-02-25 v2

Abstract

A doodle is a collection of immersed circles without triple intersections in the 22-sphere. It was shown by the second author and P.~Tayler that doodles induce commutator identities (identities amongst commutators) in a free group. In this paper we observe this idea more closely by concentrating on doodles with proper noose systems and elementary commutator identities. In particular we show that there is a bijection between cobordism classes of colored doodles and weak equivalence classes of elementary commutator identities.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.08871,
  title  = {Doodles and commutator identities},
  author = {Andrew Bartholomew and Roger Fenn and Naoko Kamada and Seiichi Kamada},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.08871},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:21:31.527Z