Related papers: Obstructions to trivializing a knot

These notes were prepared to supplement the talk that I gave on Feb 19, 2004, at the First East Asian School of Knots and Related Topics, Seoul, South Korea. In this article I review aspects of the interconnections between braids, knots and…

By using double branched covers, we prove that there is a 1-1 correspondence between the set of knotoids in the 2-sphere, up to orientation reversion and rotation, and knots with a strong inversion, up to conjugacy. This correspondence…

In this paper we introduce distinct approaches to loop braid groups, a generalisation of braid groups, and unify all the definitions that have appeared so far in literature, with a complete proof of the equivalence of these definitions.…

We show that two knots have matching Vassiliev invariants of order less than n if and only if they are equivalent modulo the nth group of the lower central series of some pure braid group, thus characterizing Vassiliev's knot invariants in…

The contents of this 6-page paper have been subsumed into the 13-page paper, "A note on closed 3-braids", arXiv:0802.1072 [math.GT]. This paper is correct, but contains less information than the new one. The topological classification of…

Simple closed curves in the plane can be mapped to nontrivial knots under the action of origami foldings that allow the paper to self-intersect. We show all tame knot types may be produced in this manner, motivating the development of a new…

A knot is an an embedding of a circle into three-dimensional space. We say that a knot is unknotted if there is an ambient isotopy of the embedding to a standard circle. By representing knots via planar diagrams, we discuss the problem of…

The relationships between braid ordering and the geometry of its closure is studied. We prove that if an essential closed surface $F$ in the complements of closed braid has relatively small genus with respect to the Dehornoy floor of the…

In this paper we describe the structure of a group of conjugating automorphisms $C_n$ of free group and prove that this structure is similar to the structure of a braid group $B_n$ with $n>1$ strings. We find the linear representation of…

This work presents an approach towards the representation theory of the braid groups $B_n$. We focus on finite-dimensional representations over the field of Laurent series which can be obtained from representations of infinitesimal braids,…

We develop a calculus of surgery data, called bridged links, which involves besides links also pairs of balls that describe one-handle attachements. As opposed to the usual link calculi of Kirby and others this description uses only…

We show that there is a knot satisfying the property that for each minimal crossing number diagram of the knot and each single crossing of the diagram, changing the crossing results in a diagram for a knot whose unknotting number is at…

We first motivate the study of a certain quotient of the loop braid category, both for the mathematics underpinning recent approaches to topological quantum computation; and as a key example in non-semisimple higher representation theory.…

Both classical and virtual knots arise as formal Gauss diagrams modulo some abstract moves corresponding to Reidemeister moves. If we forget about both over/under crossings structure and writhe numbers of knots modulo the same Reidemeister…

New presentations of a link and a virtual link are introduced and algebraic systems on links and virtual links are constructed respectively. Based on the algebraic systems, Reduction Crossing Algorithms for them are proposed which are used…

In this report, I will start by first giving a brief introduction on knots to build some intuition before beginning the more rigorous review in the Literature Review section. There, I will define knot equivalence, the Jones polynomial…

In Classical Knot Theory and in the new Theory of Quantum Invariants substantial effort was directed toward the search for unknotting moves on links. We solve, in this note, several classical problems concerning unknotting moves. Our…

This paper proposes for every $n$, linear time reductions of the word and conjugacy problems on the braid groups $B_n$ to the corresponding problems on the braid monoids $B_n^+$ and moreover only using positive words representations.

We prove that deciding if a diagram of the unknot can be untangled using at most $k$ Riedemeister moves (where $k$ is part of the input) is NP-hard. We also prove that several natural questions regarding links in the $3$-sphere are NP-hard,…

We study a subset of square free positive braids and we give a few algebraic characterizations of them and one geometric characterization: the set of positive braids whose closures are unlinks. We describe canonical forms of these braids…