Exceptional surgeries on alternating knots (Q303522)

The main result of this really interesting paper says that if \(K\) is a hyperbolic alternating knot in the 3-sphere that admits a non-trivial exceptional surgery, i.e.\ a surgery that is not a hyperbolic manifold, then \(K\) is equivalent to an arborescent knot. The definition of an arborescent knot is somewhat technical, so we postpone it to the end of the review. The work of \textit{M. Lackenby} [Invent. Math. 140, No. 2, 243--282 (2000; Zbl 0947.57016)] reduced the problem of proving the above result to dealing with finitely many examples. The main achievement of the paper is to come up with various methods to reduce the computational complexity to a manageable size and to carry it out rigorously with the help of a super computer. The authors also give a complete classification of exceptional surgeries on alternating knots. For example the classification shows that if \(K\) is an alternating knot, that is not the figure-eight knot, then it admits at most five exceptional surgeries. This proves the Gordon conjecture for alternating knots. We conclude with the definition of an arborescent knot. First, a tangle is defined as a properly embedded 1-manifold in the 3-ball. From two arcs of rational slope drawn on the boundary of a pillowcase-shaped 3-ball, one can obtain a tangle, which is called a rational tangle. A tangle obtained by putting rational tangles together in a horizontal way is called a Montesinos tangle. An arborescent tangle is then defined as a tangle that can be obtained by summing several Montesinos tangles together in an arbitrary order. The closure of an arborescent tangle is called an arborescent knot.