Related Research Articles
William Paul Thurston was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology. In 1982, he was awarded the Fields Medal for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds. From 2003 until his death he was a professor of mathematics and computer science at Cornell University.
In topology, knot theory is the study of mathematical knots. While inspired by knots which appear in daily life, such as those in shoelaces and rope, a mathematical knot differs in that the ends are joined together so that it cannot be undone, the simplest knot being a ring. In mathematical language, a knot is an embedding of a circle in 3-dimensional Euclidean space, R3. Two mathematical knots are equivalent if one can be transformed into the other via a deformation of R3 upon itself ; these transformations correspond to manipulations of a knotted string that do not involve cutting the string or passing the string through itself.
Peter Guthrie Tait FRSE was a Scottish mathematical physicist and early pioneer in thermodynamics. He is best known for the mathematical physics textbook Treatise on Natural Philosophy, which he co-wrote with Kelvin, and his early investigations into knot theory.
In mathematics, a knot is an embedding of a topological circle S1 in 3-dimensional Euclidean space, R3, considered up to continuous deformations (isotopies).
In the mathematical field of knot theory, the Jones polynomial is a knot polynomial discovered by Vaughan Jones in 1984. Specifically, it is an invariant of an oriented knot or link which assigns to each oriented knot or link a Laurent polynomial in the variable with integer coefficients.
Allen Edward Hatcher is an American topologist.
In knot theory, a knot or link diagram is alternating if the crossings alternate under, over, under, over, as one travels along each component of the link. A link is alternating if it has an alternating diagram.
In mathematics, Khovanov homology is an oriented link invariant that arises as the homology of a chain complex. It may be regarded as a categorification of the Jones polynomial.
The Tait conjectures are three conjectures made by 19th-century mathematician Peter Guthrie Tait in his study of knots. The Tait conjectures involve concepts in knot theory such as alternating knots, chirality, and writhe. All of the Tait conjectures have been solved, the most recent being the Flyping conjecture.
In the mathematical field of knot theory, a split link is a link that has a (topological) 2-sphere in its complement separating one or more link components from the others. A split link is said to be splittable, and a link that is not split is called a non-split link or not splittable. Whether a link is split or non-split corresponds to whether the link complement is reducible or irreducible as a 3-manifold.
In the mathematical theory of knots, a satellite knot is a knot that contains an incompressible, non boundary-parallel torus in its complement. Every knot is either hyperbolic, a torus, or a satellite knot. The class of satellite knots include composite knots, cable knots and Whitehead doubles. A satellite link is one that orbits a companion knot K in the sense that it lies inside a regular neighborhood of the companion.
Václav (Vašek) Chvátal (Czech: [ˈvaːtslaf ˈxvaːtal] is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He has published extensively on topics in graph theory, combinatorics, and combinatorial optimization.
In the mathematical theory of knots, the Perko pair, named after Kenneth Perko, is a pair of entries in classical knot tables that actually represent the same knot. In Dale Rolfsen's knot table, this supposed pair of distinct knots is labeled 10161 and 10162. In 1973, while working to complete the Tait–Little knot tables of knots up to 10 crossings (dating from the late 19th century), Perko found the duplication in Charles Newton Little's table. This duplication had been missed by John Horton Conway several years before in his knot table and subsequently found its way into Rolfsen's table. The Perko pair gives a counterexample to a "theorem" claimed by Little in 1900 that the writhe of a reduced diagram of a knot is an invariant (see Tait conjectures), as the two diagrams for the pair have different writhes.
Morwen B. Thistlethwaite is a knot theorist and professor of mathematics for the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He has made important contributions to both knot theory and Rubik's Cube group theory.
In the mathematical theory of knots, a flype is a kind of manipulation of knot and link diagrams used in the Tait flyping conjecture. It consists of twisting a part of a knot, a tangle T, by 180 degrees. Flype comes from a Scots word meaning to fold or to turn back. Two reduced alternating diagrams of an alternating link can be transformed to each other using flypes. This is the Tait flyping conjecture, proven in 1991 by Morwen Thistlethwaite and William Menasco.
William Walker Tait is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he served as a faculty member from 1972 to 1996, and as department chair from 1981 to 1987.
Knots have been used for basic purposes such as recording information, fastening and tying objects together, for thousands of years. The early, significant stimulus in knot theory would arrive later with Sir William Thomson and his theory of vortex atoms.
In the mathematical area of knot theory, the crossing number of a knot is the smallest number of crossings of any diagram of the knot. It is a knot invariant.
Joel Hass is an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics and chair of the mathematics department at the University of California, Davis.