Computing Vassiliev's invariants

✍ Scribed by Theodore B. Stanford

• Book ID: 104295139
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 978 KB
• Volume: 77
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0166-8641
• DOI: 10.1016/s0166-8641(96)00121-6

✦ Synopsis

We give an explicit algorithm for computing all of Vassiliev's knot invariants of order < n, which has been implemented on a computer. In giving a justification of the algorithm, we obtain a simple proof of the sufficiency of the topological l-term and 4-term relations. We use an example of Taniyama to show that two singular knot diagrams with the same configuration cannot always be made isotopic by crossing changes alone.