Related papers: Getting a handle on the Conway knot
Given a knot in $S^3$, one can associate to it a surface diffeomorphism in two different ways. First, an arbitrary knot in $S^{3}$ can be represented by braids, which can be thought of as diffeomorphisms of punctured disks. Second, if the…
The surgery unknotting number of a Legendrian link is defined as the minimal number of particular oriented surgeries that are required to convert the link into a Legendrian unknot. Lower bounds for the surgery unknotting number are given in…
Neuwirth asked if any non-trivial knot in the 3-sphere can be embedded in a closed surface so that the complement of the surface is a connected essential surface for the knot complement. In this paper, we examine some variations on this…
A polynomial knot is a smooth embedding $\kappa: \real \to \real^n$ whose components are polynomials. The case $n = 3$ is of particular interest. It is both an object of real algebraic geometry as well as being an open ended topological…
The lattice stick number $s_L(K)$ of a knot $K$ is defined to be the minimal number of straight line segments required to construct a stick presentation of $K$ in the cubic lattice. In this paper, we find an upper bound on the lattice stick…
We define an operation on homology ${B}^4$ which we call an $n$-twist annulus modification. We give a new construction of smoothly slice knots and exotically slice knots via $n$-twist annulus modifications. As an application, we present a…
In the early 1980's Mike Freedman showed that all knots with trivial Alexander polynomial are topologically slice (with fundamental group Z). This paper contains the first new examples of topologically slice knots. In fact, we give a…
Prime power fold cyclic branched covers along smoothly slice knots all bound rational homology balls. This phenomenon, however, does not characterize slice knots. In this paper, we give a new construction of non-slice knots that have the…
This thesis develops some general calculational techniques for finding the orders of knots in the topological concordance group C. The techniques currently available in the literature are either too theoretical, applying to only a small…
We say that two knots are friends if they share the same 0-surgery. Two friends with different sliceness status would provide a counterexample to the 4-dimensional smooth Poincar\'e conjecture. Here we create a census of all friends with…
Morley's Theorem about angle trisectors can be viewed as the statement that a certain diagram `exists', meaning that triangles of prescribed shapes meet in a prescribed pattern. This diagram is the case n=3 of a class of diagrams we call…
We generalize the idea of unknotting knots to Seifert surfaces. We define an operation called ribbon twist which serves as the equivalent of a crossing change for knots. A Seifert surface is considered untwisted, the equivalent to…
In this paper, we define a lassoing on a link, a local addition of a trivial knot to a link. Let K be an s-component link with the Conway polynomial non-zero. Let L be a link which is obtained from K by r-iterated lassoings. The complete…
A 2-component oriented link in $S^3$ is called weakly doubly slice if it is a cross-section of an unknotted sphere in $S^4$, and strongly doubly slice if it is a cross-section of a 2-component trivial spherical link in $S^4$. We give the…
We define cylinder knots as billiard knots in a cylinder. We present a necessary condition for cylinder knots: after dividing cylinder knots by possible rotational symmetries we obtain ribbon knots. We obtain an upper bound for the number…
In this paper we define the equivariant double-slice genus and equivariant super-slice genus of a strongly invertible knot. We prove lower bounds for both the equivariant double-slice genus and the equivariant super-slice genus. Using these…
A revised proof of the author's earlier result is given. It is shown that a boundary surface-link in the 4-sphere is a ribbon surface-link if the surface-link obtained from it by surgery along a pairwise nontrivial fusion 1-handle system is…
We show that the Conway polynomials of Fibonacci links are Fibonacci polynomials modulo 2. We deduce that, when $ n \not\equiv 0 \Mod 4$ and $(n,j) \neq (3,3),$ the Fibonacci knot $ \cF_j^{(n)} $ is not a Lissajous knot.
A disconnected cut of a connected graph is a vertex cut that itself also induces a disconnected subgraph. The decision problem whether a graph has a disconnected cut is called Disconnected Cut. This problem is closely related to several…
We construct many examples of non-slice knots in 3-space that cannot be distinguished from slice knots by previously known invariants. Using Whitney towers in place of embedded disks, we define a geometric filtration of the 3-dimensional…