Nombre de ponts et générateurs méridiens des entrelacs de Montesinos (Q1060740)

It is still an open question as to whether the bridge number b(L) of a link L in \(S^ 3\) must equal w(L), the minimal number of meridians needed to generate the link group. (It is easy to show that b(L)\(\geq w(L)\) for all L.) Here the equality is proven for all generalized Montesinos links, a class which has attracted much attention as a natural generalization of the class of 2-bridge links, in that the 2-fold branched cyclic cover of a (generalized) Montesinos link is a Seifert fibre space. The argument gives in particular the first explicit calculation of the bridge numbers of these links.