Meridional rank and bridge number for a class of links (Q2408265)

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}].)