Arcs on Punctured Disks Intersecting at Most Twice with Endpoints on the Boundary

Let $D_n$ be the $n$-punctured disk. We prove that a family of essential simple arcs starting and ending at the boundary and pairwise intersecting at most twice is of size at most $\binom{n+1}{3}$. On the way, we also show that any nontrivial square complex homeomorphic to a disk whose hyperplanes are simple arcs intersecting at most twice must have a corner or a spur.Comment: Assaf Bar-Natan's MSc thesis, written under the supervision of Prof. Piotr Przytyck

A Note on the Unitarity Property of the Gassner Invariant

We give a 3-page description of the Gassner invariant / representation of braids / pure braids, along with a description and a proof of its unitarity property.Comment: Mistake fixed in the accompanying Mathematica notebook (not the paper itself

Two applications of elementary knot theory to Lie algebras and Vassiliev invariants

Using elementary equalities between various cables of the unknot and the Hopf link, we prove the Wheels and Wheeling conjectures of [Bar-Natan, Garoufalidis, Rozansky and Thurston, arXiv:q-alg/9703025] and [Deligne, letter to Bar-Natan, January 1996, http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~drorbn/Deligne/], which give, respectively, the exact Kontsevich integral of the unknot and a map intertwining two natural products on a space of diagrams. It turns out that the Wheeling map is given by the Kontsevich integral of a cut Hopf link (a bead on a wire), and its intertwining property is analogous to the computation of 1+1=2 on an abacus. The Wheels conjecture is proved from the fact that the k-fold connected cover of the unknot is the unknot for all k. Along the way, we find a formula for the invariant of the general (k,l) cable of a knot. Our results can also be interpreted as a new proof of the multiplicativity of the Duflo-Kirillov map S(g)-->U(g) for metrized Lie (super-)algebras g.Comment: Published by Geometry and Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTVol7/paper1.abs.htm