The universal character ring of some families of one-relator groups

Abstract

We study the universal character ring of some families of one-relator groups. As an application, we calculate the universal character ring of two-generator one-relator groups whose relators are palindrome, and, in particular, of the (-2,2m+1,2n+1)-pretzel knot for all integers m and n. For the (-2,3,2n+1)-pretzel knot, we give a less technical proof of a result in [LT1] on its universal character ring, and an elementary proof of a result in [Ma] on the number of irreducible components of its character variety.Comment: Minor changes. To appear in Algebraic and Geometric Topolog