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arXiv · 1108.5640

Bridge number and tangle products

Ryan Blair
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Abstract

We show that essential punctured spheres in the complement of links with distance three bridge spheres have bounded complexity. We define the operation of tangle product, a generalization of both connected sum and Conway product. Finally, we use the bounded complexity of essential punctured spheres to show that the bridge number of a tangle product is at least the sum of the bridge numbers of the two factor links up to a constant error.

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Ryan Blair. 2011-08-29. Bridge number and tangle products. https://arxiv.org/abs/1108.5640

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