Related papers: Reidemeister Moves and Groups

Residual torsion-free nilpotence has proven to be an important property for knot groups with applications to bi-orderability and ribbon concordance. Mayland proposed a strategy to show that a two-bridge knot group has a commutator subgroup…

The residual torsion-free nilpotence of the commutator subgroup of a knot group has played a key role in studying the bi-orderability of knot groups. A technique developed by Mayland provides a sufficient condition for the commutator…

Let {a,b} and {c,d} be two pairs of bounding simple closed curves on an oriented surface which intersect nontrivialy. We prove that if these pairs are invariant under the action of an orientation reversing involution, then the corresponding…

Stallings remarked that an outer automorphism of a free group may be thought of as a subdivision of a graph followed by a sequence of folds. In this thesis, we prove that automorphisms of fundamental groups of graphs of groups satisfying…

Simple closed curves in the plane can be mapped to nontrivial knots under the action of origami foldings that allow the paper to self-intersect. We show all tame knot types may be produced in this manner, motivating the development of a new…

We establish inequalities that constrain the genera of smooth cobordisms between knots in 4-dimensional cobordisms. These "relative adjunction inequalities" improve the adjunction inequalities for closed surfaces which have been…

We give an explicit description of the free objects in the quasivariety of adequate semigroups, as sets of labelled directed trees under a natural combinatorial multiplication. The morphisms of the free adequate semigroup onto the free…

Recent progress in string theory has led to a reformulation of quantum-group polynomial invariants for knots and links into new polynomial invariants whose coefficients can be understood in topological terms. We describe in detail how to…

Given a group endowed with a Z/2-valued morphism we associate a Gauss diagram theory, and show that for a particular choice of the group these diagrams encode faithfully virtual knots on a given arbitrary surface. This theory contains all…

Almost-direct products of free groups arise naturally in braid theory and in the study of automorphism groups of free groups. Although bi-invariant orderings are known to exist for many such groups, their explicit structure is often left…

There are several knot invariants in the literature that are defined using singular instantons. Such invariants provide strong tools to study the knot group and give topological applications. For instance, it gives powerful tools to study…

This note aims to introduce a left adjoint functor to the functor which assigns a heap to a group. The adjunction is monadic. It is explained how one can decompose a free group functor through the previously introduced adjoint and employ it…

We introduce an up-down coloring of a virtual-link diagram. The colorabilities give a lower bound of the minimum number of Reidemeister moves of type II which are needed between two 2-component virtual-link diagrams. By using the notion of…

Torus knots are an important family of knots about which much is understood; invariants of torus knots often exhibit nice formulas, making them convenient and fundamental building blocks for examples in knot theory. Spiral knots, defined…

We provide two alternative ways to determine the number of (bi-)twisted conjugacy classes in a finite group: one by counting certain irreducible characters and one by counting certain twisted conjugacy classes of other endomorphisms. In…

The recent proof by Bigelow and Krammer that the braid groups are linear opens the possibility of applications to the study of knots and links. It was proved by the first author and Menasco that any closed braid representative of the unknot…

We initiate the homotopical study of racks and quandles, two algebraic structures that govern knot theory and related braided structures in algebra and geometry. We prove analogs of Milnor's theorem on free groups for these theories and…

We characterize, in an algebraic and in a diagrammatic way, Milnor string link invariants indexed by sequences where any index appears at most $k$ times, for any fixed $k\ge 1$. The algebraic characterization is given in terms of an…

The motivation of this work is to define cohomology classes in the space of knots that are both easy to find and to evaluate, by reducing the problem to simple linear algebra. We achieve this goal by defining a combinatorial graded cochain…

This paper is expository and is accessible to students. We define simple invariants of knots or links (linking number, Arf-Casson invariants and Alexander-Conway polynomials) motivated by interesting results whose statements are accessible…