arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Blake Mellor.
Vassiliev invariants can be studied by studying the spaces of chord diagrams associated with singular knots. To these chord diagrams are associated the intersection graphs of the chords. We extend results of Chmutov, Duzhin and Lando to show that these graphs determine the chord diagram if the graph has at most one loop. We also compute the size of the subalgebra generated by these "loop diagrams."
Bar-Natan used Chinese characters to show that finite type invariants classify string links up to homotopy. In this paper, I construct the correct spaces of chord diagrams and Chinese characters for links up to homotopy. I use these spaces to show that the only rational finite type invariants of link homotopy are the pairwise linking numbers of the components.
This paper is a generalization of the author's previous work on link homotopy to link concordance. We show that the only real-valued finite type link concordance invariants are the linking numbers of the components.
We define a notion of finite type invariants for links with a fixed linking matrix. We show that Milnor's triple link homotopy invariant is a finite type invariant, of type 1, in this sense. We also generalize the approach to Milnor's higher order homotopy invariants and show that they are also, in a sense, of finite type. Finally, we compare our approach to another approach for defining finite type invariants within linking classes.