Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

One of the first results on concordance was a condition on the Alexander polynomials of slice knots, now known as the Fox-Milnor condition. In this talk, we discuss a generalization of the Fox-Milnor condition to links and their multivariable Alexander polynomials. The main tool is an interpretation of the Alexander polynomials in terms of “Reidemeister torsion”, a notion defined for general manifolds. We will see that the Fox-Milnor condition is a reflection of a certain duality theorem for Reidemeister torsion.