Related papers: Computing closed essential surfaces in knot comple…
We give a topological characterisation of alternating knot exteriors based on the presence of special spanning surfaces. This shows that alternating is a topological property of the knot exterior and not just a property of diagrams,…
Tests of the integrality properties of a scalar operator in topological strings on a resolved conifold background or orientifold of conifold backgrounds have been performed for arborescent knots and some non-arborescent knots. The recent…
Using the Hatcher-Oertel algorithm for finding boundary slopes of Montesinos knots, we prove the Slope Conjecture and the Strong Slope Conjecture for a family of 3-tangle pretzel knots. More precisely, we prove that the maximal degrees of…
We exhibit the first example of a knot in the three-sphere with a pair of minimal genus Seifert surfaces that can be distinguished using the sutured Floer homology of their complementary manifolds together with the Spin^c-grading. This…
We present some algorithms that provide useful topological information about curves in surfaces. One of the main algorithms computes the geometric intersection number of two properly embedded 1-manifolds $C_1$ and $C_2$ in a compact…
A zigzag in a map (a $2$-cell embedding of a connected graph in a connected closed $2$-dimensional surface) is a cyclic sequence of edges satisfying the following conditions: 1) any two consecutive edges lie on the same face and have a…
A non-singular connected algebraic curve $A$ in a simply connected algebraic surface $X$ can be knotted so that its homology class and the fundamental group of its complement in $X$ is preserved, provided $A$ is sufficiently complex (not…
Motivated by a question of Neumann and Reid, we study whether Dehn fillings on all but one cusp of a hyperbolic link complement can produce infinite families of knot complements with hidden symmetries which geometrically converge to the…
Physical knot classification is a challenging fine-grained recognition task in which the intended discriminative cue is rope crossing structure; however, high closed-set accuracy may still arise from low-level appearance shortcuts rather…
In general dimension, there is no known total polynomial algorithm for either convex hull or vertex enumeration, i.e. an algorithm whose complexity depends polynomially on the input and output sizes. It is thus important to identify…
It has long been known that the quadratic term in the degree of the colored Jones polynomial of a knot is bounded above in terms of the crossing number of the knot. We show that this bound is sharp if and only if the knot is adequate. As an…
In this paper, we characterize closed incompressible surfaces of genus two in the complements of 3-bridge knots and links. This characterization includes that of essential 2-string tangle decompositions for 3-bridge knots and links.
Extending upon our previous work, we verify the Jones Unknot Conjecture for all knots up to $24$ crossings. We describe the method of our approach and analyze the growth of the computational complexity of its different components.
In three-dimensional computational topology, the theory of normal surfaces is a tool of great theoretical and practical significance. Although this theory typically leads to exponential time algorithms, very little is known about how these…
We continue the development of methods for enumerating nodal curves on smooth complex surfaces, stressing the range of validity. We illustrate the new methods in three important examples. First, for up to eight nodes, we confirm…
Tollefson described a variant of normal surface theory for 3-manifolds, called Q-theory, where only the quadrilateral coordinates are used. Suppose $M$ is a triangulated, compact, irreducible, boundary-irreducible 3-manifold. In Q-theory,…
We present an enhanced prime decomposition theorem for knots that gives the isotopy classes of composite knots that can be constructed from a given list of prime factors (allowing for the mirroring and orientation reversing for each…
We study cosmetic crossings in knots of genus one and obtain obstructions to such crossings in terms of knot invariants determined by Seifert matrices. In particular, we prove that for genus one knots the Alexander polynomial and the…
We use matchings on Lyndon words to classify flat knots up to 8 crossings. Using flat knots invariants such as the based matrix, the $\phi$-invariant, the flat arrow polynomial, and the flat Jones-Krushkal polynomial, we distinguish all…
Unknot recognition is one of the fundamental questions in low dimensional topology. In this work, we show that this problem can be encoded as a validity problem in the existential fragment of the first-order theory of real closed fields.…