A lower bound on tunnel number degeneration (Q2630665)

This paper establishes a new lower bound on the tunnel number of the connected sum of any two knots in the 3-sphere; to wit, the larger of the two [Theorem 4.1]. Its proof relies on a bound for the Heegaard genus under special kinds of toroidal amalgamations of 3-manifolds [Theorem 3.21] and a discussion of the limited application of these techniques to knots in homology spheres, related open questions, and a trivial ``analog of Theorem 4.1 for rank'' (pointed out by R. Weidmann) that should be of interest to researchers in this field.