Cosmetic surgeries on knots in S^3

Series
Geometry Topology Student Seminar
Time
Wednesday, February 26, 2020 - 2:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Hugo Zhou – Georgia Tech
Organizer
Sarah (Sally) Collins

Cosmetic surgeries (purely cosmetic surgeries) are two distinct surgeries on a knot that produce homeomorphic 3-manifolds (as oriented manifolds). It is one of the ways Dehn surgeries on knots could fail to be unique. Gordon conjectured that there are no nontrivial purely cosmetic surgeries on nontrivial knots in S^3. We will recap the progress of the problem over time, and mainly discuss Ni and Wu's results in their paper "Cosmetic surgeries on knots in S^3".