Wheels, wheeling, and the Kontsevich integral of the unknot (Q1594895)

This paper deals with Vassiliev invariants (or finite type invariants) of knots in the three dimensional sphere. More precisely, the authors conjecture an explicit formula for the framed Kontsevich integral of the trivial knot (wheels). They also conjecture a formula for the relation between two natural products on the space of uni-trivalent graphs (wheeling). By an article of \textit{D. Bar-Natan} [Topology 34, No. 2, 423-472 (1995; Zbl 0898.57001)] it is known that there is a parallelism between the space of diagrams (modulo certain relations) and a certain part of the theory of Lie algebras. The main result of the paper is that the analogue of the two conjectures holds on the level of semi-simple Lie algebras. Note that by the work of P.~Vogel it is known that semi-simple Lie algebras do not detect the whole Vassiliev theory of high degrees. In an epilogue the authors report on recent proofs of their full conjectures by M. Kontsevich, D. Bar-Natan, T. Q. T. Le and D. P. Thurston.