English

Ribbonlength of folded ribbon unknots in the plane

Geometric Topology 2016-07-18 v2

Abstract

We study Kauffman's model of folded ribbon knots: knots made of a thin strip of paper folded flat in the plane. The ribbonlength is the length to width ratio of such a ribbon, and it turns out that the way the ribbon is folded influences the ribbonlength. We give an upper bound of ncot(π/n)n\cot(\pi/n) for the ribbonlength of nn-stick unknots. We prove that the minimum ribbonlength for a 3-stick unknot with the same type of fold at each vertex is 333\sqrt{3}, and such a minimizer is an equilateral triangle. We end the paper with a discussion of projection stick number and ribbonlength.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1602.08084,
  title  = {Ribbonlength of folded ribbon unknots in the plane},
  author = {Elizabeth Denne and Mary Kamp and Rebecca Terry and Xichen and Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.08084},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

16 pages, 16 figures