English

Knot Fertility and Lineage

Geometric Topology 2017-05-26 v1

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new type of relation between knots called the descendant relation. One knot HH is a descendant of another knot KK if HH can be obtained from a minimal crossing diagram of KK by some number of crossing changes. We explore properties of the descendant relation and study how certain knots are related, paying particular attention to those knots, called fertile knots, that have a large number of descendants. Furthermore, we provide computational data related to various notions of knot fertility and propose several open questions for future exploration.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.08990,
  title  = {Knot Fertility and Lineage},
  author = {Jason Cantarella and Allison Henrich and Elsa Magness and Oliver O'Keefe and Kayla Perez and Eric J. Rawdon and Briana Zimmer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.08990},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

20 pages, 11 figures, 14 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:58:26.914Z