Penn Arts & Sciences Logo

Geometry-Topology Seminar

Thursday, September 23, 2010 - 4:30pm

Ryan Blair

University of Pennsylvania

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4C8

Width is an invariant of knots closely related to the notion of bridge number. Width minimizing embeddings of knots carry useful information about the topology of the knot complement. Although width has been an integral tool in several celebrated results in 3-manifold topology, some of its most basic properties are still unknown. In this talk we will discuss how width behaves with respect to connected sum.