Related papers: Unsolvable problems about higher-dimensional knots…

It is shown that various questions about the existence of simple closed curves in normal subgroups of surface groups are undecidable.

This thesis develops some general calculational techniques for finding the orders of knots in the topological concordance group C. The techniques currently available in the literature are either too theoretical, applying to only a small…

We classify the solutions to an overdetermined elliptic problem in the plane in the finite connectivity case. This is achieved by establishing a one-to-one correspondence between the solutions to this problem and a certain type of minimal…

I briefly discuss a method of obtaining distinct classes of topologically equivalent knots by developing appropriate computer programs.

For a natural number $c$, a $c$-arrangement is an arrangement of dimension $c$ subspaces satisfying the following condition: the sum of any subset of the subspaces has dimension a multiple of $c$. Matroids arising as normalized rank…

We study problems related to indecomposability of modules over certain local finite dimensional trivial extension algebras. We do this by purely combinatorial methods. We introduce the concepts of graph of cyclic modules, of combinatorial…

Let $C$ be a smooth irreducible affine curve $C$ over an algebraically closed field of positive characteristic and let $\pi_1(C)$ be its fundamental group. We study various embedding problems for $\pi_1(C)$ and its subgroups.

The finite groups having an indecomposable polynomial invariant whose degree is at least half of the order of the group are classified. Apart from four sporadic exceptions these are exactly the groups having a cyclic subgroup of index at…

Theories of classification distinguish classes with some good structure theorem from those for which none is possible. Some classes (dense linear orders, for instance) are non-classifiable in general, but are classifiable when we consider…

An integral of a group $G$ is a group $H$ whose commutator subgroup is isomorphic to $G$. In this paper, we prove that the integrability of a finite group is a decidable problem.

We show that the Diophantine problem(decidability of equations) is undecidable in free associative algebras over any field and in the group algebras over any field of a wide variety of torsion free groups, including toral relatively…

We investigate the first-order theory of closed subspaces of complex Hilbert spaces in the signature $(\lor,\perp,0,1)$, where `$\perp$' is the orthogonality relation. Our main result is that already its quasi-identities are undecidable:…

We investigate the possible structures imposed on a finite group by its possession of an automorphism sending a large fraction of the group elements to their cubes, the philosophy being that this should force the group to be, in some sense,…

We relate the computational complexity of finite strings to universal representations of their underlying symmetries. First, Boolean functions are classified using the universal covering topologies of the circuits which enumerate them. A…

The conjugacy problem for a finitely generated group $G$ is the two-variable problem of deciding for an arbitrary pair $(u,v)$ of elements of $G$, whether or not $u$ is conjugate to $v$ in $G$. We construct examples of finitely generated,…

The topological underpinnings are presented for a new algorithm which answers the question: `Is a given knot the unknot?' The algorithm uses the braid foliation technology of Bennequin and of Birman and Menasco. The approach is to consider…

We show that all groups in a very large class of Coxeter groups are locally quasiconvex and have uniform membership problem solvable in quadratic time. If a group in the class satisfies a further hypothesis it is subgroup separable and…

We consider decidability problems in self-similar semigroups, and in particular in semigroups of automatic transformations of $X^*$. We describe algorithms answering the word problem, and bound its complexity under some additional…

The higher order matching problem is the problem of determining whether a term is an instance of another in the simply typed $\lambda$-calculus, i.e. to solve the equation a = b where a and b are simply typed $\lambda$-terms and b is…

For a finitely generated group $G$, the \emph{Diophantine problem} over $G$ is the algorithmic problem of deciding whether a given equation $W(z_1,z_2,\ldots,z_k) = 1$ (perhaps restricted to a fixed subclass of equations) has a solution in…