Topology Atlas | Conferences


Knots in Washington XXIII; Quandles, their homology and ramifications
November 17-19, 2006
George Washington University
Washington, DC, USA

Organizers
Jozef H. Przytycki (GWU), przytyck@gwu.edu, Yongwu Rong (GWU), rong@gwu.edu, Alexander Shumakovitch (GWU), shurik@gwu.edu

Conference Homepage


The sheet numbers of 2-knots with non-trivial fundamental quandles
by
Shin SATOH
Kobe University

An embedded 2-sphere in R4 is called a 2-knot, which is described by a diagram through a projection of R4 onto R3. Such a diagram is regarded as a disjoint union of compact connected surfaces divided by crossing information. The sheet number of a 2-knot is the minimal number of such surfaces for all possible diagrams of the 2-knot. We prove that if the fundamental quandle of a 2-knot is non-trivial (in particular, if the fundamental group of the complement of the 2-knot is non-trivial), then its sheet number is greater than or equal to four. This gives an alternative proof of our previous result that the sheet numbers of the 0- and 2-twist-spun trefoils are equal to four.

Date received: October 25, 2006


Copyright © 2006 by the author(s). The author(s) of this work and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Topology Atlas. Document # catp-02.