Knot Theory - Knot Equivalence

Knot Equivalence

A knot is created by beginning with a one-dimensional line segment, wrapping it around itself arbitrarily, and then fusing its two free ends together to form a closed loop (Adams 2004)(Sossinsky 2002). When topologists consider knots and other entanglements such as links and braids, they consider the space surrounding the knot as a viscous fluid. If the knot can be pushed about smoothly in the fluid, without intersecting itself, to coincide with another knot, the two knots are considered equivalent. The idea of knot equivalence is to give a precise definition of when two knots should be considered the same even when positioned quite differently in space. A formal mathematical definition is that two knots are equivalent if one can be transformed into the other via a type of deformation of R3 upon itself, known as an ambient isotopy.

The basic problem of knot theory, the recognition problem, is determining the equivalence of two knots. Algorithms exist to solve this problem, with the first given by Wolfgang Haken in the late 1960s (Hass 1998). Nonetheless, these algorithms can be extremely time-consuming, and a major issue in the theory is to understand how hard this problem really is (Hass 1998). The special case of recognizing the unknot, called the unknotting problem, is of particular interest (Hoste 2005).