On comparing the writhe of a smooth curve to the writhe of an inscribed polygon

We find bounds on the difference between the writhing number of a smooth curve, and the writhing number of a polygon inscribed within. The proof is based on an extension of Fuller's difference of writhe formula to the case of polygonal curves. The results establish error bounds useful in the computation of writhe.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

On the Minimum Ropelength of Knots and Links

The ropelength of a knot is the quotient of its length and its thickness, the radius of the largest embedded normal tube around the knot. We prove existence and regularity for ropelength minimizers in any knot or link type; these are $C^{1,1}$ curves, but need not be smoother. We improve the lower bound for the ropelength of a nontrivial knot, and establish new ropelength bounds for small knots and links, including some which are sharp.Comment: 29 pages, 14 figures; New version has minor additions and corrections; new section on asymptotic growth of ropelength; several new reference

Knot Tightening By Constrained Gradient Descent

We present new computations of approximately length-minimizing polygons with fixed thickness. These curves model the centerlines of "tight" knotted tubes with minimal length and fixed circular cross-section. Our curves approximately minimize the ropelength (or quotient of length and thickness) for polygons in their knot types. While previous authors have minimized ropelength for polygons using simulated annealing, the new idea in our code is to minimize length over the set of polygons of thickness at least one using a version of constrained gradient descent. We rewrite the problem in terms of minimizing the length of the polygon subject to an infinite family of differentiable constraint functions. We prove that the polyhedral cone of variations of a polygon of thickness one which do not decrease thickness to first order is finitely generated, and give an explicit set of generators. Using this cone we give a first-order minimization procedure and a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker criterion for polygonal ropelength criticality. Our main numerical contribution is a set of 379 almost-critical prime knots and links, covering all prime knots with no more than 10 crossings and all prime links with no more than 9 crossings. For links, these are the first published ropelength figures, and for knots they improve on existing figures. We give new maps of the self-contacts of these knots and links, and discover some highly symmetric tight knots with particularly simple looking self-contact maps.Comment: 45 pages, 16 figures, includes table of data with upper bounds on ropelength for all prime knots with no more than 10 crossings and all prime links with no more than 9 crossing

A Fast Direct Sampling Algorithm for Equilateral Closed Polygons

Sampling equilateral closed polygons is of interest in the statistical study of ring polymers. Over the past 30 years, previous authors have proposed a variety of simple Markov chain algorithms (but have not been able to show that they converge to the correct probability distribution) and complicated direct samplers (which require extended-precision arithmetic to evaluate numerically unstable polynomials). We present a simple direct sampler which is fast and numerically stable, and analyze its runtime using a new formula for the volume of equilateral polygon space as a Dirichlet-type integral.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. Added Duplantier as coauthor; we now give the precise asymptotic complexity of the algorith