Related papers: Short Ropes and Long Knots
A grid poset -- or grid for short -- is a product of chains. We ask, what does a random linear extension of a grid look like? In particular, we show that the average "jump number," i.e., the number of times that two consecutive elements in…
Numerical simulations indicate that there exist conformations of the unknot, tied on a finite piece of rope, entangled in such a manner, that they cannot be disentangled to the torus conformation without cutting the rope. The simplest…
Physical knots and links are one-dimensional submanifolds of R^3 with fixed length and thickness. We show that isotopy classes in this category can differ from those of classical knot and link theory. In particular we exhibit a Gordian…
In this article we present a unified way to smooth certain multiple structures called ropes on smooth varieties. We prove that most ropes of arbitrary multiplicity, supported on smooth curves can be smoothed. By a rope being smoothable we…
This survey reviews Kauffman's model of folded ribbon knots: knots made of a thin strip of paper folded flat in the plane. The ribbonlength is the length to width ratio of such a ribbon, and the ribbonlength problem asks to minimize the…
Knots are commonly found in molecular chains such as DNA and proteins, and they have been considered to be useful models for structural analysis of these molecules. One interested quantity is the minimum number of monomers necessary to…
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…
In this paper we present a detailed study of \emph{bonded knots} and their related structures, integrating recent developments into a single framework. Bonded knots are classical knots endowed with embedded bonding arcs modeling physical or…
Agol proved that ribbon concordance forms a partial ordering on the set of knots in the $3$-sphere. In this paper, we prove that all tight fibered knots are minimal in this partially ordered set. We also give the table of prime minimal…
We consider the ways minimal sets of flows in $S^3$ may be embedded. We prove that given any $C^2$ flow on $S^3$ with positive entropy, there is an uncountable collection $\mathcal{M}$ of topologically distinct minimal sets such that for…
The ropelength of a space curve is usually defined as the quotient of its length by its thickness: the radius of the largest embedded tube around the knot. This idea was extended to space polygons by Eric Rawdon, who gave a definition of…
The ribbonlength Rib$(K)$ of a knot $K$ is the infimum of the ratio of the length of any flat knotted ribbon with core $K$ to its width. A twisted torus knot $T_{p,q;r,s}$ is obtained from the torus knot $T_{p,q}$ by twisting $r$ adjacent…
A singular knot is an immersed circle in $\mathbb R^{3}$ with finitely many transverse double points. The study of singular knots was initially motivated by the study of Vassiliev invariants. Namely, singular knots give rise to a decreasing…
A thick link is a link in $\mathbb{R}^3$ such that each component of the link lies at distance at least $1$ from every other component. Strengthening the notion of thickness, we define a thickly embedded link to be a thick link whose open…
The ribbonlength of a link is a geometric invariant defined as the infimum of the ratio of the length to the width of a folded ribbon realization of the link. In this paper, we prove that if an alternating link admits an alternating diagram…
We work on the notions of rail arcs and rail isotopy in $\mathbb{R}^3$, and we introduce the notions of rail knotoid diagrams and their equivalence. Our main result is that two rail arcs in $\mathbb{R}^3$ are rail isotopic if and only if…
We prove a version of symmetric criticality for ropelength-critical knots. Our theorem implies that a knot or link with a symmetric representative has a ropelength-critical configuration with the same symmetry. We use this to construct 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…
We study knots in $\mathbb{S}^3$ obtained by the intersection of a minimal surface in $\mathbb{R}^4$ with a small 3-sphere centered at a branch point. We construct examples of new minimal knots. In particular we show the existence of…
In this note we show that ribbon concordance forms a partial ordering on the set of knots, answering a question of Gordon. The proof makes use of representation varieties of the knot groups to $SO(N)$ and relations between them induced by a…