The rate of growth of the number of prime alternating links and tangles (Q1392493)

It was shown by Ernst and Sumners that the number of \(n\)-crossing links grows exponentially with increasing \(n\), and an upper bound on this rate of growth has been obtained by Welsh. In the present interesting and well-written paper prime, alternating links and tangles are considered. Let \(A_n\) and \(a_n\) denote the number of \(n\)-crossing, prime, unoriented, alternating links and the number of strong equivalence classes of prime, alternating tangles with \(n\) crossings, respectively. Then the exact value of \(\lim_{n\to\infty} (A_n)^{1/n}\) is obtained, by investigating the generating function \(\sum a_n z^n\). An asymptotic formula for \(a_n\) is obtained by deriving a certain functional equation for the generating function and applying Darboux's method for obtaining asymptotic information on the coefficients of a power series from knowledge of the nature of singularities of the power series. Other ingredients of the proofs are Conway's approach to the enumeration of knots and links using the concepts of algebraic tangle and basic polyhedron, the solution of the Tait flyping conjecture by Menasco and the second author and Tutte's enumeration of the number of ``rooted \(c\)-nets''. As noted in the last section of the paper, the machinery developed will be used in a future paper to show that the ratio of the number of prime, alternating links with \(n\) crossings to the total number of prime links with \(n\) crossings tends to zero exponentially.