English

Turk's head knots and links: a survey

Geometric Topology 2026-01-13 v3 History and Overview Symplectic Geometry

Abstract

We collect and discuss various results on an important family of knots and links called Turk's head knots and links Th(p,q)Th (p,q). In the mathematical literature, they also appear under different names such as rosette knots and links or weaving knots and links. Unless being the unknot or the alternating torus links T(2,q)T(2,q), the Turk's head links Th(p,q)Th (p,q) are all known to be alternating, fibered, hyperbolic, invertible, non-split, periodic, and prime. The Turk's head links Th(p,q)Th (p,q) are also both positive and negative amphichiral if pp is chosen to be odd. Moreover, we highlight and present several more results, focusing on Turk's head knots Th(3,q)Th (3,q). We finally list several open problems and conjectures for Turk's head knots and links. We conclude with a short appendix on torus knots and links, which might be of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.20106,
  title  = {Turk's head knots and links: a survey},
  author = {Alessio Di Prisa and Oğuz Şavk},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.20106},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

37 pages, 10 figures and 1 table. Exposition is substantially changed