SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2303.12138

Tabulating Knot Mosaics: Crossing Number 10 or Less

Abstract

The study of knot mosaics is based upon representing knot diagrams using a set of tiles on a square grid. This branch of knot theory has many unanswered questions, especially regarding the efficiency with which we draw knots as mosaics. While any knot or link can be displayed as a mosaic, for most of them it is still unknown what size of mosaic (mosaic number) is necessary and how many non-blank tiles (tile number) are necessary to depict a given knot or link. We implement an algorithmic programming approach to find the mosaic number and tile number of all prime knots with crossing number 10 or less. We also introduce an online repository which includes a table of knot mosaics and a tool that allows users can create and identify their own knot mosaics.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Aaron Heap, Douglas Baldwin, James Canning, Greg Vinal. 2023-03-21. Tabulating Knot Mosaics: Crossing Number 10 or Less. https://doi.org/10.2140/involve.2025.18.91

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Bar cohomology of links: beyond Milnor invariants

We develop bar cohomology of link complements as an invariant of links in homology spheres. In this setting, bar cohomology is a Hopf algebra which is calculable using surfaces and their intersection curves in a link complement. In this first in a sequence of works, we introduce the invariant and show that it defines a canonical subspace of the tensor Hopf algebra, which already encodes information about Milnor's link invariants and provides geometrically significant information beyond them.

math.GT

Homological lifts of Arnold invariants $J^-$ and $J^+$

Viro's Euler-integral polynomial $P_C(q)$ and the Lanzat--Polyak quantized-curvature polynomial $I_q(C)$ refine Arnold's invariants $J^-$ and $J^+$ for generic immersed one-component plane curves. We construct homological lifts of both. The bigraded region homology retains the singular homology of every connected Alexander-index region; its graded Euler characteristic is $P_C(q)$. The triply graded smoothing-circle homology is generated by the oriented circles of the orientation-preserving smoothing and decategorifies to the smoothing term in $I_q(C)$. Keeping the actual region summands and the boundary regions of every smoothing circle gives a homological refinement of the oriented smoothing configuration, or Seifert state. An infinite family proves strictness: both polynomial data and the ordinary homological lifts agree, while the component-graded region homology and the branch-decomposed circle homology distinguish every pair. Further constructions recover the full $I_q(C)$ by a vertex complex, realize the local change of its curvature integral by edge homology, and give a canonical two-state homology for unoriented curves. Viro described his Euler-integral formula as an analogue of face state-sum formulas for quantum knot polynomials. Through the categorifications developed here, we obtain one concrete homological face-state-sum model realizing that analogy.

math.GT