Unknotting unknots

DOI10.4169/AMER.MATH.MONTHLY.121.05.379MaRDI QIDQ2928634zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Allison Henrich, Louis Kauffman

Publication date 10 November 2014

Published in American Mathematical Monthly (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1006.4176

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Abstract: A knot is an an embedding of a circle into three-dimensional space. We say that a knot is unknotted if there is an ambient isotopy of the embedding to a standard circle. By representing knots via planar diagrams, we discuss the problem of unknotting a knot diagram when we know that it is unknotted. This problem is surprisingly difficult, since it has been shown that knot diagrams may need to be made more complicated before they may be simplified. We do not yet know, however, how much more complicated they must get. We give an introduction to the work of Dynnikov who discovered the key use of arc--presentations to solve the problem of finding a way to detect the unknot directly from a diagram of the knot. Using Dynnikov's work, we show how to obtain a quadratic upper bound for the number of crossings that must be introduced into a sequence of unknotting moves. We also apply Dynnikov's results to find an upper bound for the number of moves required in an unknotting sequence.

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(13)

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• Unknots with highly knotted control polygons
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• Hard Diagrams of the Unknot
• Arc-presentations of links: Monotonic simplification
• Local and algorithmic moves of knots according to Lackenby
• Connected sum and crossing numbers of flat virtual knots
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• Polynomial unknotting and singularity index
• A polynomial upper bound on Reidemeister moves
• Complexity of unknotting of trivial \(2\)-knots
• Unknot diagrams requiring a quadratic number of Reidemeister moves to untangle

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