Getting a handle on the Conway knot
Geometric Topology
2021-07-21 v1
Abstract
A knot is said to be slice if it bounds a smooth disk in the 4-ball. For 50 years, it was unknown whether a certain 11 crossing knot, called the Conway knot, was slice or not, and until recently, this was the only one of the thousands of knots with fewer than 13 crossings whose slice-status remained a mystery. We will describe Lisa Piccirillo's proof that the Conway knot is not slice. The main idea of her proof is given in the title of this article.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2107.09171,
title = {Getting a handle on the Conway knot},
author = {Jennifer Hom},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.09171},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
12 pages, many figures. This expository article is associated with a lecture given by the author in the Current Events Bulletin session of the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January 2021. To appear in the Bulletin of the AMS