On the Vassiliev knot invariants (Q1804909)

This article which appeared in 1995 can by today be considered one of the ``classical'' articles in the topic of Vassiliev invariants; it is referred to by almost any author treating the subject. This is due to the fact that the article presents a large collection of material -- most of which is due to the author, to Kontsevich and to Birman and Lin -- as well as a lot of important basic notions such as weight system, 4-T-relation, STU relation and others. Among the questions treated are: -- The definition of Vassiliev invariants and of weight systems. It is shown that any Vassiliev invariant leads to a weight system and the theorem of Kontsevich is presented which states that over the real numbers any weight system can be integrated up as to yield a Vassiliev invariant, thus over \(\mathbb R\), the notions of weight system and Vassiliev invariant are essentially the same. -- The algebra of chord diagrams, its Hopf-algebra structure, different descriptions of this algebra, one of which is especially suited for dealing with primitive elements. -- The connection between the classical knot polynomials and Vassiliev invariants. -- How to construct weight systems from Lie algebras. A lot of exercises and conjectures are given. This article still gives a good introduction to the subject of Vassiliev invariants.