The colored Kauffman skein relation and the head and tail of the colored Jones polynomial

Using the colored Kauffman skein relation, we study the highest and lowest $4n$ coefficients of the $n^{th}$ unreduced colored Jones polynomial of alternating links. This gives a natural extension of a result by Kauffman in regard with the Jones polynomial of alternating links and its highest and lowest coefficients. We also use our techniques to give a new and natural proof for the existence of the tail of the colored Jones polynomial for alternating links

The tail of a quantum spin network

The tail of a sequence $\{P_n(q)\}_{n \in \mathbb{N}}$ of formal power series in $\mathbb{Z}[[q]]$ is the formal power series whose first $n$ coefficients agree up to a common sign with the first $n$ coefficients of $P_n$. This paper studies the tail of a sequence of admissible trivalent graphs with edges colored $n$ or $2n$. We use local skein relations to understand and compute the tail of these graphs. We also give product formulas for the tail of such trivalent graphs. Furthermore, we show that our skein theoretic techniques naturally lead to a proof for the Andrews-Gordon identities for the two variable Ramanujan theta function as well to corresponding identities for the false theta function.Comment: 34 Pages, 19 figure

Pretzel Knots and q-Series

The tail of the colored Jones polynomial of an alternating link is a $q$-series invariant whose first $n$ terms coincide with the first $n$ terms of the $n$-th colored Jones polynomial. Recently, it has been shown that the tail of the colored Jones polynomial of torus knots give rise to Ramanujan type identities. In this paper, we study $q$-series identities coming from the colored Jones polynomial of pretzel knots. We prove a false theta function identity that goes back to Ramanujan and we give a natural generalization of this identity using the tail of the colored Jones polynomial of Pretzel knots. Furthermore, we compute the tail for an infinite family of Pretzel knots and relate it to false theta function-type identities.Comment: 22 Pages, 14 Figure

Constructing Desirable Scalar Fields for Morse Analysis on Meshes

Morse theory is a powerful mathematical tool that uses the local differential properties of a manifold to make conclusions about global topological aspects of the manifold. Morse theory has been proven to be a very useful tool in computer graphics, geometric data processing and understanding. This work is divided into two parts. The first part is concerned with constructing geometry and symmetry aware scalar functions on a triangulated $2$-manifold. To effectively apply Morse theory to discrete manifolds, one needs to design scalar functions on them with certain properties such as respecting the symmetry and the geometry of the surface and having the critical points of the scalar function coincide with feature or symmetry points on the surface. In this work, we study multiple methods that were suggested in the literature to construct such functions such as isometry invariant scalar functions, Poisson fields and discrete conformal factors. We suggest multiple refinements to each family of these functions and we propose new methods to construct geometry and symmetry-aware scalar functions using mainly the theory of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. Our proposed methods are general and can be applied in many areas such as parametrization, shape analysis, symmetry detection and segmentation. In the second part of the thesis we utilize Morse theory to give topologically consistent segmentation algorithms

Knots, Skein Theory and q-Series

The tail of a sequence {P_n(q)} of formal power series in Z[q^{-1}][[q]], if it exists, is the formal power series whose first $n$ coefficients agree up to a common sign with the first n coefficients of P_n. The colored Jones polynomial is link invariant that associates to every link in S^3 a sequence of Laurent polynomials. In the first part of this work we study the tail of the unreduced colored Jones polynomial of alternating links using the colored Kauffman skein relation. This gives a natural extension of a result by Kauffman, Murasugi, and Thistlethwaite regarding the highest and lowest coefficients of Jones polynomial of alternating links. Furthermore, we show that our approach gives a new and natural proof for the existence of the tail of the colored Jones polynomial of alternating links. In the second part of this work, we study the tail of a sequence of admissible trivalent graphs with edges colored n or 2n. This can be considered as a generalization of the study of the tail of the colored Jones polynomial. We use local skein relations to understand and compute the tail of these graphs. Furthermore, we consider certain skein elements in the Kauffman bracket skein module of the disk with marked points on the boundary and we use these elements to compute the tail quantum spin networks. We also give product structures for the tail of such trivalent graphs. As an application of our work, we show that our skein theoretic techniques naturally lead to a proof for the Andrews-Gordon identities for the two variable Ramanujan theta function as well to corresponding new identities for the false theta function