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Gordian Knots and Links

Geometry/Topology

Speaker: Joel Hass, UC Davis
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Tue, Feb 25 2025, 2:10PM

Physical knots and links have fixed length and thickness, unlike the 1-dimensional knots studied in knot theory.  In this talk I will present the first examples of goridan unlinks. The components of these unlinks cannot be separated while maintaining constant length and thickness. We construct infinite families of 2-component gordian unlinks and also construct $n$-component gordian unlinks for each $n \geq 2$.  This is joint work with Jose Ayala.