Related papers: Conway Rational Tangles and the Thompson Group
In 1987, the second author of this paper reported his conjecture, all finite simple groups $S$ can be characterized uniformly using the order of $S$ and the set of element orders in $S$, to Prof. J. G. Thompson. In their communications,…
In this note, I describe a formalism for treating knots as geometric spaces, and make an application to a simple statistical mechanics computation. The motivation for this study is the natural visual symmetry of the knot, and I describe how…
Knot contact homology is an invariant of knots derived from Legendrian contact homology which has numerous connections to the knot group. We use basic properties of knot groups to prove that knot contact homology detects every torus knot.…
In these notes we review the calculation of Jones polynomials using a matrix representation of the braid group and Temperley-Lieb algebra. The pseudounitary representation that we consider allows constructing ``states'' from the…
Final revision. To appear in the Journal of Differential Geometry. This paper studies knots that are transversal to the standard contact structure in $\reals^3$, bringing techniques from topological knot theory to bear on their transversal…
The existence of topologically slice knots that are of infinite order in the knot concordance group followed from Freedman's work on topological surgery and Donaldson's gauge theoretic approach to 4-manifolds. Here, as an application of…
This dissertation is about rearrangement groups: a class of groups of homeomorphisms of fractal topological spaces. Introduced in 2019 by J. Belk and B. Forrest, this class generalizes the famous trio of Thompson groups $F$, $T$ and $V$ and…
The purpose of this paper is to study the properties of the irrational-slope Thompson's group $F_\tau$ introduced by Cleary in 1995. We construct presentations, both finite and infinite and we describe its combinatorial structure using…
An inscribed knot is formed by polygonally connecting points lying on a knot $\gamma$ in parametric order, then closing the path by connecting the first and final points. The stick-knot number of a knot type K is the minimum number of line…
We prove that Thompson's group $F$ has a subgroup $H$ such that the conjugacy problem in $H$ is undecidable and the membership problem in $H$ is easily decidable. The subgroup $H$ of $F$ is a closed subgroup of $F$. That is, every function…
The classical Thistlethwaite theorem for links can be phrased as asserting that the Kauffman bracket of a link can be obtained from an evaluation of the Bollob\'as-Riordan polynomial of a ribbon graph associated to one of the link's…
Knot theory provides a powerful tool for the understanding of topological matters in biology, chemistry, and physics. Here knot theory is introduced to describe topological phases in the quantum spin system. Exactly solvable models with…
In a recent paper Jones introduced a correspondence between elements of the Thompson group $F$ and certain graphs/links. It follows from his work that several polynomial invariants of links, such as the Kauffman bracket, can be…
Surprisingly Richard Thompson's groups have recently appeared in Jones' subfactor theory. Vaughan Jones is famous for linking theories that are a priori completely disconnected; for instance, his celebrated polynomial for links emanating…
In 1983, Conway and Gordon proved that for every spatial complete graph on six vertices, the sum of the linking numbers over all of the constituent two-component links is odd, and that for every spatial complete graph on seven vertices, the…
In 2014 Jones showed how to associate links in the $3$-sphere to elements of Thompson's group $F$. We provide an analogue of this program for annular links and Thompson's group $T$. The main result is that any edge-signed graph embedded in…
Virtual knot theory is a generalization (discovered by the author in 1996) of knot theory to the study of all oriented Gauss codes. (Classical knot theory is a study of planar Gauss codes.) Graph theory studies non-planar graphs via…
The curves of zero intensity of a complex optical field can form knots and links: optical vortex knots. Both theoretical constructions and experiments have so far been restricted to the very small families of torus knots or lemniscate…
A knot in $S^3$ is topologically slice if it bounds a locally flat disk in $B^4$. A knot in $S^3$ is rationally slice if it bounds a smooth disk in a rational homology ball. We prove that the smooth concordance group of topologically and…
A special class of braids, called woven, is introduced and it is shown that every conjugation class of the braid group contains woven braids. In consequence, links can be presented as plats or closures of woven braids. Restricting on knots,…