Meridional rank and bridge number for a class of links (Q2408265)
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English | Meridional rank and bridge number for a class of links |
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Meridional rank and bridge number for a class of links (English)
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12 October 2017
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This paper makes a bit more progress in answering a question posed by Cappell and Shaneson in 1978. The minimum number of meridians needed to generate a link group (its ``meridional rank'') can never be more than its bridge number. All known evidence indicates that this obvious inequality is just a poor reflection of actual equality; but proofs have been found only for limited classes of examples, to which these authors now add links with meridional rank 3 whose double branched covers are graph manifolds. Their proof splits interestingly between arborescent examples (cf. the long uncompleted work ``New geometric splittings of classical knots and the classification and symmetries of arborescent knots'' of \textit{F. Bonahon} and \textit{L. C. Siebenmann} at \url{http://www.tinyurl.com/bonsieb}, which also dates back to 1978) and all others. (An alternative approach to this ``meridional rank conjecture'' restricts attention to Wirtinger presentations obtainable from a knot diagram. See the recent work of \textit{R. Blair}, \textit{A. Kjuchukova}, \textit{R. Velazquez} and \textit{P. Villanueva} [``Wirtinger systems of generators of knot groups'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1705.03108}].)
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knot
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link
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bridge number
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meridian
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meridional rank
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2-fold branched cover
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graph manifold
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arborescent knot
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