Star cocircularities of knots
Date
2011-07-15
Authors
Flowers, Garret
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Abstract
The study of knot invariants is a large and active area of research in the field of knot theory. In the early 1990s, Russian mathematican Victor Vassiliev developed a series of numerical knot invariants, now known as Vassiliev invariants. These invariants have sparked a great deal of interest in the mathematical community, and it is conjectured that, together, they formulate a complete knot invariant. The computation of these invariants is largely algebraic, and unfortunately the values do not appear to describe any intrinsic properties of the knot. In this thesis, a geometric interpretation of the second Vassiliev invariant is provided by examining occurrances of five distinct points on the knot that lie on a common circle in the ambient space. This process is then extended to include an analysis of six-point cocircularities of knots as well.
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Keywords
knot theory, differential topology, satanic, thelemic, cocircularity