Topology Atlas | Conferences

Knots in Washington XLI
December 4-6, 2015
George Washington University
Washington, DC, USA

Organizers
Valentina Harizanov (GWU), Jozef H. Przytycki (GWU), Yongwu Rong (GWU), Radmila Sazdanovic (NCSU), Alexander Shumakovitch (GWU), Hao Wu (GWU)

Conference Homepage


Cultural Evolution of Material Knot Diversity
by
Lauren Scanlon
Durham University
Coauthors: Andrew Lobb, Jeremy Kendal, Jamie Tehrani

Knots are an important part of everyday life, tied for a variety of purposes including to secure our shoelaces. But how many different knots are actually used in everyday life? Are these knots optimised for their different uses? Why do we use the knots we do?

Using methods from Mathematics and Anthropology, I will discuss how we aim to answer these questions through building up a knot database and cultural experiments.

Date received: November 23, 2015

Copyright © 2015 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 # cblw-37.