Related papers: The bridge number of surface links and kei colorin…
Bridge multisections are combinatorial descriptions of surface links in 4-space using tuples of trivial tangles. They were introduced by Islambouli, Karimi, Lambert-Cole, and Meier to study curves in rational surfaces. In this paper, we…
Meier and Zupan showed that every surface in the four-sphere admits a bridge trisection and can therefore be represented by three simple tangles. This raises the possibility of applying methods from link homology to knotted surfaces. We use…
The fundamental quandle is an invariant for distinguishing surface knots, yet computable presentations have traditionally been limited to surfaces embedded in the $4$-sphere. Building on the framework of banded unlink diagrams introduced by…
We introduce bridge trisections of knotted surfaces in the four-sphere. This description is inspired by the work of Gay and Kirby on trisections of four-manifolds and extends the classical concept of bridge splittings of links in the…
We extend the Wirtinger number of links, an invariant originally defined by Blair, Kjuchukova, Velazquez, and Villanueva in terms of extending initial colorings of some strands of a diagram to the entire diagram, to spatial graphs. We prove…
Meier and Zupan proved that an orientable surface $\mathcal{K}$ in $S^4$ admits a tri-plane diagram with zero crossings if and only if $\mathcal{K}$ is unknotted, so that the crossing number of $\mathcal{K}$ is zero. We determine the…
We adapt Seifert's algorithm for classical knots and links to the setting of tri-plane diagrams for bridge trisected surfaces in the 4-sphere. Our approach allows for the construction of a Seifert solid that is described by a Heegaard…
We prove that every smoothly embedded surface in a 4--manifold can be isotoped to be in bridge position with respect to a given trisection of the ambient 4--manifold; that is, after isotopy, the surface meets components of the trisection in…
We consider the notion of mosaic diagrams for surface-links using marked graph diagrams. We establish bounds, in some cases tight, on the mosaic numbers for the surface-links with ch-index up to 10. As an application, we use mosaic diagrams…
The Meridional Rank Conjecture asks whether the bridge number of a knot in $S^3$ is equal to the minimal number of meridians needed to generate the fundamental group of its complement. In this paper we investigate the analogous conjecture…
We determine the set of all genus g bridge numbers of many iterated torus knots, listing these numbers in a sequence called the bridge spectrum. In addition, we prove a structural lemma about the decomposition of a strongly irreducible…
Kuperberg introduced web spaces for some Lie algebras which are generalizations of the Kauffman bracket skein module on a disk with marked points. We derive some formulas for $A_1$ and $A_2$ clasped web spaces by graphical calculus using…
We introduce a new numerical invariant of knots and links from the descending diagrams. It is considered to live between the unknotting number and the bridge number.
Frequently, knots are enumerated by their crossing number. However, the number of knots with crossing number $c$ grows exponentially with $c$, and to date computer-assisted proofs can only classify diagrams up to around twenty crossings.…
We consider the number of colors for the colorings of links by the symmetric group $S_3$ of degree $3$. For knots, such a coloring corresponds to a Fox 3-coloring, and thus the number of colors must be 1 or 3. However, for links, there are…
If a knot K in a closed, orientable 3-manifold M has a bridge surface T with distance at least 3 in the curve complex of T - K, then the genus of any essential surface in its exterior with non-empty, non-meridional boundary gives rise to an…
In a 3-manifold M, let K be a knot and R be an annulus which meets K transversely. We define the notion of the pair (R,K) being caught by a surface Q in the exterior of the link given by K and the boundary curves of R. For a caught pair…
Analogous to a classical knot diagram, a surface-link can be generically projected to 3-space and given crossing information to create a broken sheet diagram. The triple point number of a surface-link is the minimal number of triple points…
A diagonal surface in a link exterior M is a properly embedded, incompressible, boundary incompressible surface which furthermore has the same number of boundary components and same slope on each component of the boundary of M. We derive a…
Every embedded surface $\mathcal{K}$ in the 4-sphere admits a bridge trisection, a decomposition of $(S^4,\mathcal{K})$ into three simple pieces. In this case, the surface $\mathcal{K}$ is determined by an embedded 1-complex, called the…