Related papers: A 2-chain can interlock with a k-chain
It is an open problem, posed in \cite{SoCG}, to determine the minimal $k$ such that an open flexible $k$-chain can interlock with a flexible 2-chain. It was first established in \cite{GLOSZ} that there is an open 16-chain in a trapezoid…
An equilateral stick number $s_{=}(K)$ of a knot $K$ is defined to be the minimal number of sticks required to construct a polygonal knot of $K$ which consists of equal length sticks. Rawdon and Scharein [12] found upper bounds for the…
Polyominoes are a subset of polygons which can be constructed from integer-length squares fused at their edges. A system of polygons P is interlocked if no subset of the polygons in P can be removed arbitrarily far away from the rest. It is…
For a knot K, the concordance crosscap number, c(K), is the minimum crosscap number among all knots concordant to K. Building on work of G. Zhang, which studied the determinants of knots with c(K) < 2, we apply the Alexander polynomial to…
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…
We prove that every (6k + 2l, 2k)-connected simple graph contains k rigid and l connected edge-disjoint spanning subgraphs. This implies a theorem of Jackson and Jord\'an [4] and a theorem of Jord\'an [6] on packing of rigid spanning…
We investigate the existence of closed polylines (also known as closed polygonal chains or self-crossing polygons) that intersect each of their edges the same number of times. The most general question in this corner of combinatorial…
It is well-known that all 2-knots are slice. Are all 2-links slice? This is an outstanding open question. In this paper we prove the following: For any 2-component 2-link (J,K)in the 4-sphere which bounds the 5-ball B^5, there is an…
A ribbon is a two-dimensional object with one-dimensional properties which is related with geometry, robotics and molecular biology. A folded ribbon structure provides a complex structure through a series of folds. We focus on a folded…
We accidentally observed that one key can open two padlocks from different brands. Based on this observation, here we derived equations to estimate the number of different padlocks that can be produced. We focus on simple padlocks that are…
We prove that fibred knots cannot be untied with $\bar{t}_{2k}$-moves, for all $k \geq 2$. More generally, we give an upper bound on the number of two strand twist operations that allow to untie a knot with non-trivial HOMFLY polynomial, in…
It is known that there are 21 ribbon knots with 10 crossings or fewer. We show that for every ribbon knot, there exists a tangle that satisfies two properties associated with the knot. First, under a specific closure, the closed tangle is…
In this paper, we prove that for any $k\ge 3$, there exist infinitely many minimal asymmetric $k$-uniform hypergraphs. This is in a striking contrast to $k=2$, where it has been proved recently that there are exactly $18$ minimal asymmetric…
Symmetries of knots have been studied extensively, and strongly invertible knots are one of them. Lamm defined the equivariant crossing number $c_t(K)$, the minimum crossing number among all symmetric diagrams for a strongly invertible knot…
In this paper we compute the sharp lower bounds for the crossing number of $n$-string $k$-loop essential tangles. For essential tangles with only string components, we characterise the ones with the minimum crossing number for a given…
Consider an infinite collection of qubits arranged in a line, such that every pair of nearest neighbors is entangled: an "entangled chain." In this paper we consider entangled chains with translational invariance and ask how large one can…
The flow of contracting systems contracts 1-dimensional polygons (i.e. lines) at an exponential rate. One reason for the usefulness of contracting systems is that many interconnections of contracting sub-systems yield an overall contracting…
We prove that the tunnel number of a satellite chain link with a number of components higher than or equal to twice the bridge number of the companion is as small as possible among links with the same number of components. We prove this…
The notions of $k$-separability and $k$-producibility are useful and expressive tools for the characterization of entanglement in multipartite quantum systems, when a more detailed analysis would be infeasible or simply needless. In this…
In this paper, we prove that for any $k\ge 3$, there exist infinitely many minimal asymmetric $k$-uniform hypergraphs. This is in a striking contrast to $k=2$, where it has been proved recently that there are exactly $18$ minimal asymmetric…