Burnside obstructions to the Montesinos-Nakanishi 3-move conjecture

Yasutaka Nakanishi asked in 1981 whether a 3-move is an unknotting operation. In Kirby's problem list, this question is called `The Montesinos-Nakanishi 3-move conjecture'. We define the n-th Burnside group of a link and use the 3rd Burnside group to answer Nakanishi's question; ie, we show that some links cannot be reduced to trivial links by 3-moves.Comment: Published by Geometry and Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTVol6/paper11.abs.htm

Homology operations on homology of quandles

We consider various homological operations on homology of quandles. We introduce the notion of quandle partial derivatives, and extreme chains on which appropriate partial derivatives vanish. Extreme chains yield homological operations. We also consider the degree one homology operations created using elements of the quandle satisfying the so-called $k$-condition.Comment: 26 pages, 1 figur

A Generalization of the Gram determinant of type A

The Gram determinant of type $A$ was introduced by Lickorish in his work on invariants of 3 - manifolds. We generalize the theory of the Gram determinant of type $A$ by evaluating, in the annulus, a bilinear form of non-intersecting connections in the disc. The main result provides a closed formula for this Gram determinant. We conclude the paper by discussing Chen's conjecture about the Gram determinant of type $Mb$ evaluated in the Klein bottle.Comment: 17 pages, 19 figure