Computer Assisted Projective Rigidity

Abstract

In this paper we provide a computer assisted proof that about two thousand surgeries far away from the ideal point in the hyperbolic Dehn filling space of the figure-eight knot complement are infinitesimally projectively rigid. We also prove that for projective deformations of the figure-eight knot complement sufficiently close to the complete hyperbolic structure, the induced map on the first cohomology of the longitude of the boundary torus is non-zero. This paper provides a complementary piece to the results of Heusener and Porti who showed that for each k in Z, there is a sufficiently large Nk for which every k/n-Dehn filling on the figure-eight knot complement for n larger than Nk is infinitesimally projectively rigid. In the process of the proof, we provide explicit representations of the figure-eight knot complement in PSO(3,1) which are rational in the real and imaginary parts of the shapes of the ideal tetrahedra used to glue the knot complement together.