X-Nico

unusual facts about knot theory



History of manifolds and varieties

Henri Poincaré's 1895 paper Analysis Situs studied three-and-higher-dimensional manifolds(which he called "varieties"), giving rigorous definitions of homology, homotopy (which had originally been defined in the context of late nineteenth-century knot theory, developed by Maxwell and others), and Betti numbers and raised a question, today known as the Poincaré conjecture, based his new concept of the fundamental group.

Jorge Pullin

Pullin, Gambini, and Bernd Brügman also wrote a series of papers that make an important connection between knot theory and quantum gravity, by showing that the Jones polynomial can be used to solve a quantum form of Einstein's equations.

Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications

The Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications was established in 1992 by Louis Kauffman and was the first journal purely devoted to knot theory.

Ubiquitin carboxy-terminal hydrolase L1

Human UCH-L1 and the closely related protein UCHL3 have one of the most complicated knot structure yet discovered for a protein, with five knot crossings.


see also

George Yuri Rainich

According to some sources, Peter Gabriel Bergmann brought Rainich's suggestion that algebraic topology (and knot theory in particular) should play a role in physics to the attention of John Archibald Wheeler, which shortly led to the Ph.D. thesis of Charles W. Misner.

Isotopy

Regular isotopy of a link diagram, an equivalence relation in knot theory

Slice genus

Livingston, Charles, A survey of classical knot concordance, in: Handbook of knot theory, pp 319–347, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2005.