Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A knot in the 3-sphere is slice if it bounds a smooth disc in the 4-ball. A knot is ribbon if it bounds a self-intersecting disc with only singularities that are closed arcs consisting of intersection points of the disc with itself. Every ribbon knot is a slice knot; the converse is a famous unsolved conjecture of Fox. This talk will show some recent interesting progress around the slice-ribbon conjecture.