Unknotting operations

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - 12:30pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006 / https://bluejeans.com/396232086/4264
Speaker
Hannah Turner – Georgia Tech – hannah.turner@math.gatech.edu – https://sites.google.com/view/hturner/home?authuser=0
Organizer
Christopher DuPre

Please Note: Talk will be presented live as well as streamed. Questions will be fielded by the organizer.

We'll discuss various operations which can be applied to a knot to "simplify" or "unknot" it. Study of these "unknotting operations" began in the 1800s and continues to be an active area of research in low-dimensional topology. Many of these operations have applications more broadly in topology including to 3- and 4-manifolds and even to DNA topology. I will define some of these operations and highlight a few open problems.