Computing a link diagram from its exterior

DOI10.1007/S00454-023-00533-WMaRDI QIDQ6145673zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Nathan M. Dunfield, Malik Obeidin

Publication date 9 January 2024

Published in Discrete \& Computational Geometry (Search for Journal in Brave)

Copyright license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03251

zbMATH Keywords

computational topologyknotknot diagramknot exteriorlinklink diagramlink exteriorlow-dimensional topology

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Knot theory (57K10) General topology of 3-manifolds (57K30)

Abstract: A knot is a circle piecewise-linearly embedded into the 3-sphere. The topology of a knot is intimately related to that of its exterior, which is the complement of an open regular neighborhood of the knot. Knots are typically encoded by planar diagrams, whereas their exteriors, which are compact 3-manifolds with torus boundary, are encoded by triangulations. Here, we give the first practical algorithm for finding a diagram of a knot given a triangulation of its exterior. Our method applies to links as well as knots, allows us to recover links with hundreds of crossings. We use it to find the first diagrams known for 23 principal congruence arithmetic link exteriors; the largest has over 2,500 crossings. Other applications include finding pairs of knots with the same 0-surgery, which relates to questions about slice knots and the smooth 4D Poincar'e conjecture.

Review text

In this paper, the authors give the first practical algorithm to find a diagram of a knot in the 3-space given a triangulation of its exterior. That is, the main problem being considered is: FIND DIAGRAM. Input a triangulation \(\mathcal{T}\) of a knot exterior \(E(K)\), output a diagram of the knot \(K\). Precisely, the input of their algorism is; (a) an ideal triangulation of a compact 3-manifold with toroidal boundary, with an essential simple closed curve for each boundary component, and (b) a sequence of Pachner moves transforming the layered filling triangulation of the manifold obtained by Dehn filling along the given simple closed curve into a specific 2-tetrahedra base triangulation of the 3-sphere. They actually implement the algorithm in Python. In practice, to get the part (b) of Input, a heuristic simplification method is applied to the input triangulation by using Pachner moves. The algorithm is actually practical; for example, experimental mean running time is reported as \(O(1.07^n)\), where \(n\) is the number of tetrahedra in the input triangulation. There are several applications; an interesting one is to obtain a ``simple Dehn surgery presentation of the well-known Seifert-Weber dodecahedral space.

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