AKT-09/Tricolourability

DBN: Classes: 2009-10: AKT-09/Navigation # Week of... Videos, Notes, and Links 1 Sep 7 About This Class  090910-1: 3-colourings, Reidemeister's theorem, invariance, the Kauffman bracket.  090910-2: R23 invariance of the bracket, R1, the writhe, the Jones polynomial, programming the Jones polynomial. Tricolourability 2 Sep 14  090915: More on Jones, some pathologies and more on Reidemeister, our overall agenda.  090917-1: The definition of finite type, weight systems, Jones is a finite type series.  090917-2: The skein relation for Jones; HOMFLY-PT and Conway; the weight system of Jones. 3 Sep 21  090922: FI, 4T, HOMFLY and FI and 4T, statement of the Fundamental Theorem, framed knots.  090924-1: Some dimensions of ${\mathcal {A}}_{n}$, ${\mathcal {A}}$ is a commutative algebra, ${\mathcal {A}}(\bigcirc )\equiv {\mathcal {A}}(\uparrow )$. Class Photo  090924-2: ${\mathcal {A}}$ is a co-commutative algebra, the relation with products of invariants, ${\mathcal {A}}$ is a bi-algebra. 4 Sep 28 Homework Assignment 1 Homework Assignment 1 Solutions  090929: The Milnor-Moore theorem, primitives, the map ${\mathcal {A}}^{r}\to {\mathcal {A}}$.  091001-1: Jacobi diagrams, AS, IHX, STU, and the equivalence of all that with 4T.  091001-2: The very basics on Lie algebras. 5 Oct 5  091006: Lie algebraic weight systems, $gl_{N}$.  091008-1: More on $gl_{N}$, Lie algebras and the four colour theorem.  091008-2: The "abstract tenssor" approach to weight systems, ${\mathcal {U}}({\mathfrak {g}})$ and PBW, the map ${\mathcal {T}}_{\mathfrak {g}}$. 6 Oct 12  091013: Algebraic properties of ${\mathcal {U}}({\mathfrak {g}})$ vs. algebraic properties of ${\mathcal {A}}$. Thursday's class canceled. 7 Oct 19  091020: Universal finite type invariants, filtered and graded spaces, expansions. Homework Assignment 2 The Stonehenge Story  091022-1: The Stonehenge Story to IHX and STU.  091022-2: The Stonhenge Story: anomalies, framings, relation with physics. 8 Oct 26  091027: Knotted trivalent graphs and their chord diagrams.  091029-1: Zsuzsi Dancso on the Kontsevich Integral (1).  091029-2: Zsuzsi Dancso on the Kontsevich Integral (2). 9 Nov 2  091103: The details of ${\mathcal {A}}^{TG}$.  091105-1: Three basic problems: genus, unknotting numbers, ribbon knots.  091105-2: The three basic problems and algebraic knot theory. 10 Nov 9  091110: Tangles and planar algebras, shielding and the generators of KTG. Homework Assignment 3 No Thursday class. 11 Nov 16 Local Khovanov Homology  091119-1: Local Khovanov homology, I.  091119-2: Local Khovanov homology, II. 12 Nov 23  091124: Emulation of one structure inside another, deriving the pentagon.  091126-1: Peter Lee on braided monoidal categories, I.  091126-2: Peter Lee on braided monoidal categories, II. 13 Nov 30  091201: The relations in KTG.  091203-1: The Existence of the Exponential Function.  091203-2: The Final Exam, Dror's failures. F Dec 7 The Final Exam on Thu Dec 10, 9-11, Bahen 6183. Register of Good Deeds / To Do List Add your name / see who's in!

The tricolourability criterion for knot diagrams may be equivalently expressed as: is it possible to associate to each strand (I am not sure what is the correct terminology, but 'segment' is a more intuitive term for me as you are allowed to change color after an undercrossing; this allowance makes sense because otherwise we would end up with a single color for the whole knot; see example of how to colour a knot diagram at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricolorability) a member of Z/3Z such that, for each crossing, the sum of the three numbers associated to the three strands involved is 0 mod 3 (that is, the three numbers are either all distinct or all the same) while excluding the case of associating the same number to every strand?

This fact can be exploited to give an algorithm for determining tricolourability of a knot diagram whose complexity is polynomial in the number of crossings. (A naive test which tried all possible colourings would require 3^(number of strands) checks.)

Define the variables $S_{1},...,S_{n}$ which are associated with the strands of a knot diagram D. Each crossing yields an equation of the form $S_{a}+S_{b}+S_{c}=0$. We can also (without loss of generality) assume $S_{1}=0$. Let M be the matrix over Z/3Z encoding the aforementioned relations. The nullity of M is non-zero if and only if there is a valid tricolouring of D.