We prove that any $11$-colorable knot is presented by an $11$-colored diagram where exactly five colors of eleven are assigned to the arcs. The number five is the minimum for all non-trivially $11$-colored diagrams of the knot. We also prove a similar result for any $11$-colorable ribbon $2$-knot.
For a knot diagram we introduce an operation which does not increase the genus of the diagram and does not change its representing knot type. We also describe a condition for this operation to certainly decrease the genus. The proof involves the study of a relation between the genus of a virtual knot diagram and the genus of a knotoid diagram, the former of which has been introduced by Stoimenow, Tchernov and Vdovina, and the latter by Turaev recently. Our operation has a simple interpretation in terms of Gauss codes and hence can easily be computer-implemented.
Introduced recently, an n-crossing is a singular point in a projection of a link at which n strands cross such that each strand travels straight through the crossing. We introduce the notion of an ubercrossing projection, a knot projection with a single n-crossing. Such a projection is necessarily composed of a collection of loops emanating from the crossing. We prove the surprising fact that all knots have a special type of ubercrossing projection, which we call a petal projection, in which no loops contain any others. The rigidity of this form allows all the information about the knot to be concentrated in a permutation corresponding to the levels at which the strands lie within the crossing. These ideas give rise to two new invariants for a knot K: the ubercrossing number u(K), and petal number p(K). These are the least number of loops in any ubercrossing or petal projection of K, respectively. We relate u(K) and p(K) to other knot invariants, and compute p(K) for several classes of knots, including all knots of nine or fewer crossings.
Knot Floer homology is a knot invariant defined using holomorphic curves. In more recent work, taking cues from bordered Floer homology,the authors described another knot invariant, called bordered knot Floer homology, which has an explicit algebraic and combinatorial construction. In the present paper, we extend the holomorphic theory to bordered Heegaard diagrams for partial knot projections, and establish a pairing result for gluing such diagrams, in the spirit of the pairing theorem of bordered Floer homology. After making some model calculations, we obtain an identification of a variant of knot Floer homology with its algebraically defined relative. These results give a fast algorithm for computing knot Floer homology.
In this article we discuss applications of neural networks to recognising knots and, in particular, to the unknotting problem. One of motivations for this study is to understand how neural networks work on the example of a problem for which rigorous mathematical algorithms for its solution are known. We represent knots by rectangular Dynnikov diagrams and apply neural networks to distinguish a given diagram class from the given finite families of topological types. The data presented to the program is generated by applying Dynnikov moves to initial samples. The significance of using these diagrams and moves is that in this context the problem of determining whether a diagram is unknotted is a finite search of a bounded combinatorial space.
This paper is a very brief introduction to knot theory. It describes knot coloring by quandles, the fundamental group of a knot complement, and handle-decompositions of knot complements.