92 research outputs found
Braids: A Survey
This article is about Artin's braid group and its role in knot theory. We set
ourselves two goals: (i) to provide enough of the essential background so that
our review would be accessible to graduate students, and (ii) to focus on those
parts of the subject in which major progress was made, or interesting new
proofs of known results were discovered, during the past 20 years. A central
theme that we try to develop is to show ways in which structure first
discovered in the braid groups generalizes to structure in Garside groups,
Artin groups and surface mapping class groups. However, the literature is
extensive, and for reasons of space our coverage necessarily omits many very
interesting developments. Open problems are noted and so-labelled, as we
encounter them.Comment: Final version, revised to take account of the comments of readers. A
review article, to appear in the Handbook of Knot Theory, edited by W.
Menasco and M. Thistlethwaite. 91 pages, 24 figure
Knot and braid invariants from contact homology I
We introduce topological invariants of knots and braid conjugacy classes, in
the form of differential graded algebras, and present an explicit combinatorial
formulation for these invariants. The algebras conjecturally give the relative
contact homology of certain Legendrian tori in five-dimensional contact
manifolds. We present several computations and derive a relation between the
knot invariant and the determinant.Comment: Published by Geometry and Topology at
http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTVol9/paper8.abs.htm
Virtual Knot Theory --Unsolved Problems
This paper is an introduction to the theory of virtual knots and links and it
gives a list of unsolved problems in this subject.Comment: 33 pages, 7 figures, LaTeX documen
Mutants and SU(3)_q invariants
Details of quantum knot invariant calculations using a specific
SU(3)_q-module are given which distinguish the Conway and Kinoshita-Teresaka
pair of mutant knots. Features of Kuperberg's skein-theoretic techniques for
SU(3)_q invariants in the context of mutant knots are also discussed.Comment: 17 pages. Published copy, also available at
http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTMon1/paper18.abs.htm
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