We show that the only endofunctors of the category of quandles commuting with the forgetful functor to sets are the power operations. We also give a similar statement for racks.
This short survey contains some recent developments of the algebraic theory of racks and quandles. We report on some elements of representation theory of quandles and ring theoretic approach to quandles.
A rack on $[n]$ can be thought of as a set of maps $(f_x)_{x in [n]}$, where each $f_x$ is a permutation of $[n]$ such that $f_{(x)f_y} = f_y^{-1}f_xf_y$ for all $x$ and $y$. In 2013, Blackburn showed that the number of isomorphism classes of racks on $[n]$ is at least $2^{(1/4 - o(1))n^2}$ and at most $2^{(c + o(1))n^2}$, where $c approx 1.557$; in this paper we improve the upper bound to $2^{(1/4 + o(1))n^2}$, matching the lower bound. The proof involves considering racks as loopless, edge-coloured directed multigraphs on $[n]$, where we have an edge of colour $y$ between $x$ and $z$ if and only if $(x)f_y = z$, and applying various combinatorial tools.
Despite a blossoming of research activity on racks and their homology for over two decades, with a record of diverse applications to central parts of contemporary mathematics, there are still very few examples of racks whose homology has been fully calculated. In this paper, we compute the entire integral homology of all permutation racks. Our method of choice involves homotopical algebra, which was brought to bear on the homology of racks only recently. For our main result, we establish a spectral sequence, which reduces the problem to one in equivariant homology, and for which we show that it always degenerates. The blueprint given in this paper demonstrates the high potential for further exploitation of these techniques.
The fundamental quandle is a powerful invariant of knots and links, but it is difficult to describe in detail. It is often useful to look at quotients of the quandle, especially finite quotients. One natural quotient introduced by Joyce is the $n$-quandle. Hoste and Shanahan gave a complete list of the knots and links which have finite $n$-quandles for some $n$. We introduce a generalization of $n$-quandles, denoted $N$-quandles (for a quandle with $k$ algebraic components, $N$ is a $k$-tuple of positive integers). We conjecture a classification of the links with finite $N$-quandles for some $N$, and we prove one direction of the classification.
The paper develops a general theory of orderability of quandles with a focus on link quandles of tame links and gives some general constructions of orderable quandles. We prove that knot quandles of many fibered prime knots are right-orderable, whereas link quandles of most non-trivial torus links are not right-orderable. As a consequence, we deduce that the knot quandle of the trefoil is neither left nor right orderable. Further, it is proved that link quandles of certain non-trivial positive (or negative) links are not bi-orderable, which includes some alternating knots of prime determinant and alternating Montesinos links. The paper also explores interconnections between orderability of quandles and that of their enveloping groups. The results establish that orderability of link quandles behave quite differently than that of corresponding link groups.