A new algorithm for recognizing the unknot

The topological underpinnings are presented for a new algorithm which answers the question: `Is a given knot the unknot?' The algorithm uses the braid foliation technology of Bennequin and of Birman and Menasco. The approach is to consider the knot as a closed braid, and to use the fact that a knot is unknotted if and only if it is the boundary of a disc with a combinatorial foliation. The main problems which are solved in this paper are: how to systematically enumerate combinatorial braid foliations of a disc; how to verify whether a combinatorial foliation can be realized by an embedded disc; how to find a word in the the braid group whose conjugacy class represents the boundary of the embedded disc; how to check whether the given knot is isotopic to one of the enumerated examples; and finally, how to know when we can stop checking and be sure that our example is not the unknot.Comment: 46 pages. Published copy, also available at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTVol2/paper9.abs.htm

Multifraction reduction III: The case of interval monoids

We investigate gcd-monoids, which are cancellative monoids in which any two elements admit a left and a right gcd, and the associated reduction of multifractions (arXiv:1606.08991 and 1606.08995), a general approach to the word problem for the enveloping group. Here we consider the particular case of interval monoids associated with finite posets. In this way, we construct gcd-monoids, in which reduction of multifractions has prescribed properties not yet known to be compatible: semi-convergence of reduction without convergence, semi-convergence up to some level but not beyond, non-embeddability into the enveloping group (a strong negation of semi-convergence).Comment: 23 pages ; v2 : cross-references updated ; v3 : one example added, typos corrected; final version due to appear in Journal of Combinatorial Algebr