Related papers: Knots in collapsible and non-collapsible balls
We prove that all knots with unknotting number at most 21 are smoothly slice in the K3 surface. We also prove a more general statement for 4-manifolds that contain a plumbing tree of spheres. Our strategy is based on a flexible method to…
We prove that any complete hyperbolic 3--manifold with finitely generated fundamental group, with a single topological end, and which embeds into $\BS^3$ is the geometric limit of a sequence of hyperbolic knot complements in $\BS^3$. In…
We present a first example of a flag vector of a polyhedral sphere that is not the flag vector of any polytope. Namely, there is a unique 3-sphere with the parameters $(f_0,f_1,f_2,f_3;f_{02})=(12,40,40,12;120)$, but this sphere is not…
It is a major unsolved problem as to whether unknot recognition - that is, testing whether a given closed loop in R^3 can be untangled to form a plain circle - has a polynomial time algorithm. In practice, trivial knots (which can be…
This book is an introduction to hyperbolic geometry in dimension three, and its applications to knot theory and to geometric problems arising in knot theory. It has three parts. The first part covers basic tools in hyperbolic geometry and…
We give a description of all (1,2)-knots in S^3 which admit a closed meridionally incompressible surface of genus 2 in their complement. That is, we give several constructions of (1,2)-knots having a meridionally incompressible surface of…
We investigate great circle links in the three-sphere, the class of links where each component is a great circle. Using the geometry of their complements, we classify such links up to five components. For any two-bridge knot complement,…
Auckly gave two examples of irreducible integer homology spheres (one toroidal and one hyperbolic) which are not surgery on a knot in the three-sphere. Using Heegaard Floer homology, the authors and Karakurt provided infinitely many small…
On every compact, orientable, irreducible 3-manifold V which is toroidal or has torus boundary components we construct a contact 1-form whose Reeb vector field R does not have any contractible periodic orbits and is tangent to the boundary.…
We show that the problem of showing that a cusped 3-manifold M is not hyperbolic is in NP, assuming $S^3$-RECOGNITION is in coNP. To this end, we show that IRREDUCIBLE TOROIDAL RECOGNITION lies in NP. Along the way we unconditionally…
The Koras-Russell threefolds are a certain family of smooth, affine contractible threefolds exhibiting "exotic" behavior in the algebro-geometric context. Our goal in this note is to extend its $\mathbb{A}^1$-contractibility from a field to…
By using double branched covers, we prove that there is a 1-1 correspondence between the set of knotoids in the 2-sphere, up to orientation reversion and rotation, and knots with a strong inversion, up to conjugacy. This correspondence…
We give an elementary obstruction to reducibility for knotted surfaces in the four-sphere. As a new application, we construct stably irreducible non-orientable surfaces.
We give some remarks on two closely related issues as stated in the title. In particular we show that a Montesinos knot is SU(2)-simple if and only if it is a 2-bridge knot, extending a result of Zentner for 3-tangle summand pretzel knots.…
In this paper, we conjecture a connection between the $A$-polynomial of a knot in $\mathbb{S}^{3}$ and the hyperbolic volume of its exterior $\mathcal{M}_{K}$ : the knots with zero hyperbolic volume are exactly the knots with an…
Any 2-bridge knot in the 3-sphere has a bridge sphere from which any other bridge surface can be obtained by stabilization, meridional stabilization, perturbation and proper isotopy.
We prove that the arc complex of a polygon with a marked point in its interior is a strongly collapsible combinatorial ball. We also show that the arc complex of a M\"{o}bius strip, with finitely many marked points on its boundary, is a…
We construct 2^{\Omega(n^{5/4})} combinatorial types of triangulated 3-spheres on n vertices. Since by a result of Goodman and Pollack (1986) there are no more than 2^{O(n log n)} combinatorial types of simplicial 4-polytopes, this proves…
We introduce a new real-valued invariant called the natural slope of a hyperbolic knot in the 3-sphere, which is defined in terms of its cusp geometry. We show that twice the knot signature and the natural slope differ by at most a constant…
We complete the first step in a two-part program proposed by Baker, Grigsby, and the author to prove that Berge's construction of knots in the three-sphere which admit lens space surgeries is complete. The first step, which we prove here,…