Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing
A new approach to knot theory
Geometry/Topology| Speaker: | Thomas Fiedler, MSRI |
| Location: | 693 Kerr |
| Start time: | Wed, Apr 14 2004, 4:10PM |
One associates to a knot in the solid torus ( e.g. a knot in 3-space or a closed braid ) a singular link , called trace link , in a thickened torus . The trace link is well defined up to some combinatorial equivalence relation and it is a complete knot invariant .First one derives numerical invariants from the trace link . But at least in the case of closed braids one can do even better . One brings the trace link into a set of normal forms which is of polynomial size .