On a computation of the skein tree depth of knots and links

Michal Jablonowski

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arXiv · 2505.15979

On a computation of the skein tree depth of knots and links

Michal Jablonowski

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Abstract

The maximum length of the shortest path from a leaf to the root of a skein tree for knots and links gives a measure of the complexity of computing link polynomials by the skein relation (the Jones polynomial, the Alexander-Conway polynomial, and more generally HOMFLY-PT polynomial). In this paper, we prove the new upper bound on the skein tree depth of a link and give examples of links where the new bound is stronger than the known bound. We also give the new lower bound. Moreover, we derive tables of knots and links with their skein tree depth that were up to now undetermined (for some of them, we give their range of possible values).

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Michal Jablonowski. 2025-05-21. On a computation of the skein tree depth of knots and links. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15979

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