Related papers: Knottedness is in NP, modulo GRH

Given a graph G and an integer k, the objective of the $\Pi$-Contraction problem is to check whether there exists at most k edges in G such that contracting them in G results in a graph satisfying the property $\Pi$. We investigate the…

This manuscript introduces a new framework for the study of knots by exploring the neighborhood of knot embeddings in the space of simple open and closed curves in 3-space. The latter gives rise to a knotoid spectrum, which determines the…

We define the knotting probability of a knot $K$ by the probability for a random polygon (RP) or self-avoiding polygon (SAP) of $N$ segments having the knot type $K$. We show fundamental and generic properties of the knotting probability…

Let G and H be two cographs. We show that the problem to determine whether H is a retract of G is NP-complete. We show that this problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the size of H. When restricted to the class of…

Knots have a twisted history in quantum physics. They were abandoned as failed models of atoms. Only much later was the connection between knot invariants and Wilson loops in topological quantum field theory discovered. Here we show that…

Given a connected graph $G$ and a terminal set $R \subseteq V(G)$, {\em Steiner tree} asks for a tree that includes all of $R$ with at most $r$ edges for some integer $r \geq 0$. It is known from [ND12,Garey et. al \cite{steinernpc}] that…

We study the behavior of the degree of the colored Jones polynomial and the boundary slopes of knots under the operation of cabling. We show that, under certain hypothesis on this degree, if a knot $K$ satisfies the Slope Conjecture then a…

Our main object of study is a certain degree-one cohomology class of the space K of long knots in R^3. We describe this class in terms of graphs and configuration space integrals, showing the vanishing of some anomalous obstructions. To…

A graph H is a vertex-minor of a graph G if it can be reached from G by the successive application of local complementations and vertex deletions. Vertex-minors have been the subject of intense study in graph theory over the last decades…

We develop purely algebraic methods for proving that a knot is prime. Our approach uses the Heegaard Floer polynomial in conjunction with classical knot-theoretic methods: cyclic, dihedral, and metacyclic covering spaces. The theory of…

The pair (K,r) consisting of a knot K and a surjective map r from the knot group onto a dihedral group is said to be a p-colored knot. D. Moskovich conjectured that for any odd prime p there are exactly p equivalence classes of p-colored…

This work establishes the complexity class of several instances of the S-packing coloring problem: for a graph G, a positive integer k and a non decreasing list of integers S = (s\_1 , ..., s\_k ), G is S-colorable, if its vertices can be…

In this paper we show how to place Michael Berry's discovery of knotted zeros in the quantum states of hydrogen in the context of general knot theory and in the context of our formulations for quantum knots. Berry gave a time independent…

We give a short, self-contained, and easily verifiable proof that determining the outerthickness of a general graph is NP-hard. This resolves a long-standing open problem on the computational complexity of outerthickness. Moreover, our…

We consider a natural generalization of Vertex Cover: the Subset Vertex Cover problem, which is to decide for a graph $G=(V,E)$, a subset $T\subseteq V$ and integer $k$, if $V$ has a subset $S$ of size at most $k$, such that $S$ contains at…

We introduce a numerical invariant \beta(K) of a knot K which measures how non-alternating K is. We prove an inequality between \beta (K) and the (knot Floer) thickness of K. As an application we show that all Montesinos knots have…

Let $G$ be a complete edge-weighted graph on $n$ vertices. To each subset of vertices of $G$ assign the cost of the minimum spanning tree of the subset as its weight. Suppose that $n$ is a multiple of some fixed positive integer $k$. The…

We give an analog of the Myhill-Nerode methods from formal language theory for hypergraphs and use it to derive the following results for two NP-hard hypergraph problems: * We provide an algorithm for testing whether a hypergraph has…

We extend knot contact homology to a theory over the ring $\mathbb{Z}[\lambda^{\pm 1},\mu^{\pm 1}]$, with the invariant given topologically and combinatorially. The improved invariant, which is defined for framed knots in $S^3$ and can be…

The K-way vertex cut problem} consists in, given a graph G, finding a subset of vertices of a given size, whose removal partitions G into the maximum number of connected components. This problem has many applications in several areas. It…