Topology Atlas | Conferences

Knots in the Triangle (Knots kNot in Washington)
April 29 - May 1, 2016
North Carolina State University
Raleigh NC, USA

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

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Ribbonlength of Knot Diagrams
by
Elizabeth Denne
Washington & Lee University
Coauthors: John M. Sullivan, Nancy Wrinkle

The ropelength problem asks to minimize the length of a knotted space curve such that a unit tube around the curve remains embedded. A two-dimensional analog has a much more combinatorial flavor: we require a unit-width ribbon around a knot diagram to be immersed with consistent crossing information. The ribbonlength is the length of the knot diagram divided by the width. In this talk I will introduce all these ideas, including a new result about the medial axis of an immersed disk in the plane.

Date received: February 24, 2016

Copyright © 2016 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 # cbmk-10.