Related papers: Positive knots have negative signature
We use the Birman-Ko-Lee presentation of the braid group to show that all closures of strongly quasipositive braids whose normal form contains a positive power of the dual Garside element $\delta$ are fibered. We classify links which admit…
The central question of knot theory is that of distinguishing links up to isotopy. The first polynomial invariant of links devised to help answer this question was the Alexander polynomial (1928). Almost a century after its introduction, it…
Weakly generalised alternating knots are knots with an alternating projection onto a closed surface in a compact irreducible 3-manifold, and they share many hyperbolic geometric properties with usual alternating knots. For example, usual…
The paper contains enumerative combinatorics for positive braids, square free braids, and simple braids, emphasizing connections with classical Fibonacci sequence. The simple subgraph of the Cayley graph of the braid group is analyzed in…
We take a close look at a classical magic trick performed with a string, where a trivial knot is seemingly isotoped into a trefoil, and generalize it to a family of magic tricks for transforming the unknot into other knots. We encode such a…
It is known that the minimal degree of the Jones polynomial of a positive knot is equal to its genus, and the minimal coefficient is 1. We extend this result to almost positive links and partly identify the 3 following coefficients for…
We provide a new bound on the maximum degree of the Jones polynomial of a positive link with second Jones coefficient equal to $\pm 1$ or $\pm 2$. This builds upon the result of our previous work, in which we found such a bound for positive…
We consider the classical pretzel knots $P(a_1, a_2, a_3)$, where $a_1, a_2, a_3$ are positive odd integers. By using continuous paths of elliptic $\mathrm{SL}_2(\mathbb R)$-representations, we show that (i) the 3-manifold obtained by…
For a noncommutative algebra $\mathcal{A}$ and an antilinear automorphism $\rho$ of $\mathcal{A}$, there is a notion of a positive trace. When we have a three-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=4$ gauge theory or four-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=2$…
We observe that there are elliptic curves over number fields all of whose quadratic twists must have positive rank, assuming the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. We give a classification of such curves in terms of their local behaviour,…
We show that nontrivial classical pretzel knots L(p,q,r) are hyperbolic with eight exceptions which are torus knots. We find Conway polynomials of n-pretzel links using a new computation tree. As applications, we compute the genera of…
As an extension of positive and almost positive diagrams and links, we study two classes of links we call successively almost positive and weakly successively almost positive links. We prove various properties of polynomial invariants and…
It is shown that Legendrian (resp. transverse) cable links in the 3-sphere with its standard tight contact structure, i.e. links consisting of an unknot and a cable of that unknot, are classified by their oriented link type and the…
We show that any closed incompressible surface in the complement of a positive knot is algebraically non-split from the knot, positive knots cannot bound non-free incompressible Seifert surfaces and that the splitability and the primeness…
We consider diagrams of links in $S^2$ obtained by projection from $S^3$ with the Hopf map and the minimal crossing number for such diagrams. Knots admitting diagrams with at most one crossing are classified. Some properties of these knots…
We show that every non-trivial strongly quasipositive link is smoothly concordant to infinitely many pairwise non-isotopic strongly quasipositive links. In contrast to our result, Baker conjectured that smoothly concordant strongly…
In this paper we introduce and study the theory of pseudo links in the genus $g$ handlebody, $H_g$. Pseudo links are links with some missing crossing information that naturally generalize the notion of knot diagrams. The motivation for…
We show that there is a knot satisfying the property that for each minimal crossing number diagram of the knot and each single crossing of the diagram, changing the crossing results in a diagram for a knot whose unknotting number is at…
It is known that the linking form on the 2-cover of slice knots has a metabolizer. We show that several weaker conditions, or some other conditions related to sliceness, do not imply the existence of a metabolizer. We then show how the…
We present two families of knots which have straight number higher than crossing number. In the case of the second family, we have computed the straight number explicitly. We also give a general theorem about alternating knots that states…