Related papers: Braid ordering and knot genus

An infinitary version of braid groups has been considered as a direct limit of n-braid groups. However, we can imagine more complicated braids with infinitely many strings. We invetisgate basic properties especially when the number of…

We describe a procedure for creating infinite families of hyperbolic knots having unique minimal genus Seifert surface. A large subset of these knots have the further property that the surface cannot be the sole compact leaf of a depth one…

We show that for many classical knots one can find generalized torsion in the fundamental group of its complement, commonly called the knot group. It follows that such a group is not bi-orderable. Examples include all torus knots, the…

We use Lee's work on the Khovanov homology to define a knot invariant s. We show that s(K) is a concordance invariant and that it provides a lower bound for the slice genus of K. As a corollary, we give a purely combinatorial proof of the…

We point out the connection between mathematical knot theory and spin glass/search problem. In particular, we present a statistical mechanical formulation of the problem of computing a knot invariant; p-colorability problem, which provides…

Any knot $K$ in genus-$1$ $1$-bridge position can be moved by isotopy to lie in a union of $n$ parallel tori tubed by $n-1$ tubes so that $K$ intersects each tube in two spanning arcs, which we call a leveling of the position. The minimal…

We introduce a new numerical invariant of knots and links from the descending diagrams. It is considered to live between the unknotting number and the bridge number.

By estimating the Turaev genus or the dealternation number, which leads to an estimate of knot floer thickness, in terms of the genus and the braid index, we show that a knot $K$ in $S^{3}$ does not admit purely cosmetic surgery whenever…

In knot concordance three genera arise naturally, g(K), g_4(K), and g_c(K): these are the classical genus, the 4-ball genus, and the concordance genus, defined to be the minimum genus among all knots concordant to K. Clearly 0 <= g_4(K) <=…

The Kontsevich integral $Z$ associates to each braid $b$ (or more generally knot $k$) invariants $Z_i(b)$ lying in finite dimensional vector spaces, for $i = 0, 1, 2, ...$. These values are not yet known, except in special cases. The…

We show that all twist knots, certain double twist knots and some other 2-bridge knots are minimal elements for the partial ordering on the set of prime knots. The key to these results are presentations of their character varieties using…

We construct a novel invariant of braids and knots, secant-quandle (SQ),with generic secants serving as generators and generic horizontal trisecants serving as relations, i.e., $SQ = \Gamma \left< \mathcal{S}_M\mid…

This article is a survey on Lorenz knots. We describe the original construction, prove several classical properties, in particular the fact that the closure of a positive braid is a fibered knot, and describe Ghys'correspondance between…

The ribbon number of a knot is the minimum number of ribbon singularities among all ribbon disks bounded by that knot. In this paper, we build on the systematic treatment of this knot invariant initiated in recent work of Friedl, Misev, and…

We initiate the study of classical knots through the homotopy class of the n-th evaluation map of the knot, which is the induced map on the compactified n-point configuration space. Sending a knot to its n-th evaluation map realizes the…

We show that the word problem for braided monoidal categories is at least as hard as the unknotting problem. As a corollary, so is the word problem for Gray categories. We conjecture that the word problem for Gray categories is decidable.

The trunk of a knot in $S^3$, defined by Makoto Ozawa, is a measure of geometric complexity similar to the bridge number or width of a knot. We prove that for any two knots $K_1$ and $K_2$, we have $tr(K_1 \# K_2) =…

We remind the method to calculate colored Jones polynomials for the plat representations of knot diagrams from the knowledge of modular transformation (monodromies) of Virasoro conformal blocks with insertions of degenerate fields. As an…

We show that the problem of deciding whether a knot in a fixed closed orientable 3-dimensional manifold bounds a surface of genus at most $g$ is in co-NP. This answers a question of Agol, Hass, and Thurston in 2002. Previously, this was…

Garoufalidis conjectured a relation between the boundary slopes of a knot and its colored Jones polynomials. According to the conjecture, certain boundary slopes are detected by the sequence of degrees of the colored Jones polynomials. We…