Related papers: The search for exotic knot traces
It is shown that for any locally knotted edge of a 3-connected graph in $S^3$, there is a ball that contains all of the local knots of that edge and is unique up to an isotopy setwise fixing the graph. This result is applied to the study of…
It has been suggested recently that knots might exist as stable soliton solutions in a simple three-dimensional classical field theory, opening up a wide range of possible applications in physics and beyond. We have re-examined and extended…
This is a report on our ongoing research on a combinatorial approach to knot recognition, using coloring of knots by certain algebraic objects called quandles. The aim of the paper is to summarize the mathematical theory of knot coloring in…
It is known that the Alexander polynomial detects fibered knots and 3-manifolds that fiber over the circle. In this note, we show that when the Alexander polynomial becomes inconclusive, the notion of "knot adjacency", studied in the paper…
Although most knots are nonalternating, modern research in knot theory seems to focus on alternating knots. We consider here nonalternating knots and their properties. Specifically, we show certain classes of knots have nontrivial Jones…
We introduce a new technique for studying classical knots with the methods of virtual knot theory. Let $K$ be a knot and $J$ a knot in the complement of $K$ with $\text{lk}(J,K)=0$. Suppose there is covering space $\pi_J: \Sigma \times…
There are 352.2 million prime knots in the 3-sphere with at most 19 crossings. We study which of these knots are slice, in both the smooth and topological categories. While no algorithm is known for deciding whether a given knot is slice in…
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…
We extend the entanglement bootstrap approach to (3+1)-dimensions. We study knotted excitations of (3+1)-dimensional liquid topological orders and exotic fusion processes of loops. As in previous work in (2+1)-dimensions, we define a…
Given a knot in a closed connected orientable 3-manifold we prove that if the exterior of the knot admits an aperiodic contact form that is Euclidean near the boundary, then the 3-manifold is diffeomorphic to the 3-sphere and the knot is…
We consider the problem of deciding whether a polygonal knot in 3-dimensional Euclidean space is unknotted, capable of being continuously deformed without self-intersection so that it lies in a plane. We show that this problem, {\sc…
The alternating knots, links and twists projected on the $S_2$ sphere were identified with the phase space of a Hamiltonian dynamic system of one degree of freedom. The saddles of the system correspond to the crossings, the edges correspond…
Knot contact homology is an ambient isotopy invariant of knots and links in $\mathbb R^3$. The purpose of this paper is to extend this definition to an ambient isotopy invariant of tangles and prove that gluing of tangles gives a gluing…
We investigate a new approach to the detection of companions to extrasolar planets beyond the transit method. We discuss the possibility of the existence of binary planets. We develop a method based on the imaging of a planet-companion as…
We introduce a geometric invariant of knots in the three-sphere, called the first-order genus, that is derived from certain 2-complexes called gropes, and we show it is computable for many examples. While computing this invariant, we draw…
We introduce a new combinatorial method to encode knots and links with applications to knot invariants. Clasp diagrams defined in this paper are combinatorial blueprints for building knot diagrams out of full twists on two strings rather…
In recent work the author investigates perfect matchings of a bipartite graph obtained from a knot diagram and demonstrates that these correspond to discrete Morse functions on a 2-complex for the 2-sphere. This relationship is expounded…
We present a practical algorithm to test whether a 3-manifold given by a triangulation or an ideal triangulation contains a closed essential surface. This property has important theoretical and algorithmic consequences. As a testament to…
We suggest a new random model for links based on meander diagrams and graphs. We then prove that trivial links appear with vanishing probability in this model, no link $L$ is obtained with probability 1, and there is a lower bound for the…
The first and last named authors have demonstrated the existence of knots for which every integral slope is non-characterizing. In this short note, we extend this result in two ways. There exists a knot that shares for every integer n the…