Related papers: Adding a suitable unknot to any link equates bridg…
In this paper we further develop the theory of matrices over the extended tropical semiring. Introducing a notion of tropical linear dependence allows for a natural definition of matrix rank in a sense that coincides with the notions of…
Fixing two concordant links in $3$--space, we study the set of all embedded concordances between them, as knotted annuli in $4$--space. When regarded up to surface-concordance or link-homotopy, the set $\mathcal{C}(L)$ of concordances from…
We show that every non-trivial tame knot or link in R^3 has a quadrisecant, i.e. four collinear points. The quadrisecant must be topologically non-trivial in a precise sense. As an application, we show that a nonsingular, algebraic surface…
We give an infinite family of knots that are not rationally concordant to their reverses. More precisely, if R denotes the involution of the rational knot concordance group QC induced by string reversal and Fix(R) denotes the subgroup of…
Shrub-depth and rank-depth are dense analogues of the tree-depth of a graph. It is well known that a graph has large tree-depth if and only if it has a long path as a subgraph. We prove an analogous statement for shrub-depth and rank-depth,…
In a graph whose vertices are assigned integer ranks, a path is well-ranked if the endpoints have distinct ranks or some interior point has a higher rank than the endpoints. A ranking is an assignment of ranks such that all nontrivial paths…
In this paper, we discuss the region unknotting number of different classes of 2-bridge knots. In particular, we provide region unknotting number for the classes of $2$-bridge knots whose Conway notation is $C(m,\ n), C(m,\ 2,\ m),$ $ C(m,\…
This is the second of three papers motivated by the author's desire to understand and explain "algebraically" one aspect of Dmitriy Zhuk's proof of the CSP Dichotomy Theorem. In this paper we extend Zhuk's "bridge" construction to arbitrary…
Ranking theories according to their strength is a recurring motif in mathematical logic. We introduce a new ranking of arbitrary (not necessarily recursively axiomatized) theories in terms of the encoding power of their $\beta$-models:…
Negami found an upper bound on the stick number $s(K)$ of a nontrivial knot $K$ in terms of the minimal crossing number $c(K)$ of the knot which is $s(K) \leq 2 c(K)$. Furthermore McCabe proved $s(K) \leq c(K) + 3$ for a $2$-bridge knot or…
For a ribbon knot, it is a folk conjecture that the rank of its knot Floer homology must be 1 modulo 8, and another folk conjecture says the same about reduced Khovanov homology. We give the first counter-examples to both of these folk…
We introduce natural language processing into the study of knot theory, as made natural by the braid word representation of knots. We study the UNKNOT problem of determining whether or not a given knot is the unknot. After describing an…
In this paper we study further when tangles embed into the unknot, the unlink or a split link. In particular, we study obstructions to these properties through geometric characterizations, tangle sums and colorings. As an application we…
The nonnegative rank of a nonnegative matrix is the minimum number of nonnegative rank-one factors needed to reconstruct it exactly. The problem of determining this rank and computing the corresponding nonnegative factors is difficult;…
A link of an isolated singularity of a two-dimensional semialgebraic surface in $R^4$ is a knot (or a link) in $S^3$. Thus the ambient Lipschitz classification of surface singularities in $R^4$ can be interpreted as a bi-Lipschitz…
We prove that if an alternating 3-braid knot has unknotting number one, then there must exist an unknotting crossing in any alternating diagram of it, and we enumerate such knots. The argument combines the obstruction to unknotting number…
We consider the moduli spaces $\mathcal{M}_d(\ell)$ of a closed linkage with n links and prescribed lengths in d-dimensional Euclidean space. For d>3 these spaces are no longer manifolds generically, but they have the structure of a…
In this paper we give a conditional improvement to the Elekes-Szab\'{o} problem over the rationals, assuming the Uniformity Conjecture. Our main result states that for $F\in \mathbb{Q}[x,y,z]$ belonging to a particular family of…
We study the closure of the projection of the (nonconvex) cone of rank restricted positive semidefinite matrices onto subsets of the matrix entries. This defines the feasible sets for semidefinite completion problems with restrictions on…
We prove a rigidity theorem that shows that, under many circumstances, quasi-isometric embeddings of equal rank, higher rank symmetric spaces are close to isometric embeddings. We also produce some surprising examples of quasi-isometric…