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1. A Symmetry Motivated Link Table

   https://doi.org/10.3390/sym10110604  

   Witte, Shawn; Flanner, Michelle; Vazquez, Mariel (November 2018, Symmetry)

   Proper identification of oriented knots and 2-component links requires a precise link nomenclature. Motivated by questions arising in DNA topology, this study aims to produce a nomenclature unambiguous with respect to link symmetries. For knots, this involves distinguishing a knot type from its mirror image. In the case of 2-component links, there are up to sixteen possible symmetry types for each link type. The study revisits the methods previously used to disambiguate chiral knots and extends them to oriented 2-component links with up to nine crossings. Monte Carlo simulations are used to report on writhe, a geometric indicator of chirality. There are ninety-two prime 2-component links with up to nine crossings. Guided by geometrical data, linking number, and the symmetry groups of 2-component links, canonical link diagrams for all but five link types (9 5 2, 9 34 2, 9 35 2, 9 39 2, and 9 41 2) are proposed. We include complete tables for prime knots with up to ten crossings and prime links with up to nine crossings. We also prove a result on the behavior of the writhe under local lattice moves. 

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2. Totally Geodesic Surfaces in Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds: Algorithms and Examples

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2024.14  

   Basilio, Brannon; Lee, Chaeryn; Malionek, Joseph (January 2024, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)

   Mulzer, Wolfgang; Phillips, Jeff M (Ed.)

   Finding a totally geodesic surface, an embedded surface where the geodesics in the surface are also geodesics in the surrounding manifold, has been a problem of interest in the study of 3-manifolds. This has especially been of interest in hyperbolic 3-manifolds and knot complements, complements of piecewise-linearly embedded circles in the 3-sphere. This is due to Menasco-Reid’s conjecture stating that hyperbolic knot complements do not contain such surfaces. Here, we present an algorithm that determines whether a given surface is totally geodesic and an algorithm that checks whether a given 3-manifold contains a totally geodesic surface. We applied our algorithm on over 150,000 3-manifolds and discovered nine 3-manifolds with totally geodesic surfaces. Additionally, we verified Menasco-Reid’s conjecture for knots up to 12 crossings. 

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3. Enumerating Nontrivial Knot Mosaics with SAT (Student Abstract)

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i11.21645  

   Miller, Hannah (June 2022, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Mathematical knots are interesting topological objects. Using simple arcs, lines, and crossings drawn on eleven possible tiles, knot mosaics are a representation of knots on a mosaic board. Our contribution is using SAT solvers as a tool for enumerating nontrivial knot mosaics. By encoding constraints for local knot mosaic properties, we computationally reduce the search space by factors of up to 6600. Our future research directions include encoding constraints for global properties and using parallel SAT techniques to attack larger boards. 

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4. The distribution of knots in the Petaluma model

   https://doi.org/10.2140/agt.2018.18.3647  

   Even-Zohar, C; Hass, J; Linial, N; Nowik, T (October 2018, Algebraic geometric topology)

   The representation of knots by petal diagrams (Adams et al 2012) naturally defines a sequence of distributions on the set of knots. We establish some basic properties of this randomized knot model. We prove that in the random n–petal model the probability of obtaining every specific knot type decays to zero as n, the number of petals, grows. In addition we improve the bounds relating the crossing number and the petal number of a knot. This implies that the n–petal model represents at least exponentially many distinct knots. Past approaches to showing, in some random models, that individual knot types occur with vanishing probability rely on the prevalence of localized connect summands as the complexity of the knot increases. However, this phenomenon is not clear in other models, including petal diagrams, random grid diagrams and uniform random polygons. Thus we provide a new approach to investigate this question. 

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5. Heegaard Floer homology and cosmetic surgeries in $S^3$

   https://doi.org/10.4171/JEMS/1218  

   Hanselman, Jonathan (March 2022, Journal of the European Mathematical Society)

   If a knot K in S^3 admits a pair of truly cosmetic surgeries, we show that the surgery slopes are either ±2 or ±1/q for some value of q that is explicitly determined by the knot Floer homology of K. Moreover, in the former case the genus of K must be 2, and in the latter case there is a bound relating q to the genus and the Heegaard Floer thickness of K. As a consequence, we show that the cosmetic crossing conjecture holds for alternating knots (or more generally, Heegaard Floer thin knots) with genus not equal to 2. We also show that the conjecture holds for any knot K for which each prime summand of K has at most 16 crossings; our techniques rule out cosmetic surgeries in this setting except for slopes ±1 and ±2 on a small number of knots, and these remaining examples can be checked by comparing hyperbolic invariants. These results make use of the surgery formula for Heegaard Floer homology, which has already proved to be a powerful tool for obstructing cosmetic surgeries; we get stronger obstructions than previously known by considering the full graded theory. We make use of a new graphical interpretation of knot Floer homology and the surgery formula in terms of immersed curves, which makes the grading information we need easier to access. 

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