Bridge number and tangle products
Geometric Topology
2011-08-30 v1
Abstract
We show that essential punctured spheres in the complement of links with distance three bridge spheres have bounded complexity. We define the operation of tangle product, a generalization of both connected sum and Conway product. Finally, we use the bounded complexity of essential punctured spheres to show that the bridge number of a tangle product is at least the sum of the bridge numbers of the two factor links up to a constant error.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1108.5640,
title = {Bridge number and tangle products},
author = {Ryan Blair},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1108.5640},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
13 pages, 11 figures