English

Vertex distortion detects the unknot

Geometric Topology 2022-12-21 v2

Abstract

The first two authors introduced vertex distortion and showed that the vertex distortion of the unknot is trivial. It was conjectured that the vertex distortion of a knot is trivial if and only if the knot is trivial. We will use Denne-Sullivan's bound on Gromov distortion to bound the vertex distortion of nontrivial lattice knots. We will then conclude that trivial vertex distortion implies the unknot, proving the conjecture. Additionally, the first conjecture in vertex distortion's debut article is proven and a vertex distortion calculator is given.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.14119,
  title  = {Vertex distortion detects the unknot},
  author = {Marion Campisi and Nicholas Cazet and David Crncevic and Tasha Fellman and Phillip Kessler and Nikolas Rieke and Vatsal Srivastava and Luis Torres},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.14119},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

12 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:13:10.067Z