MUMS Friday Event: Knots and links.
As you can see, I’ve decided that it’s about time I gave these weekly notifications some kind of label — thus is born the MUMS Friday Event category of my blog which, considering there is an event every Friday of every week, should be getting a fair bit of love from me until the end of semester.
Naturally, the events will have to go up on Thursday so that people actually know about them. We can only hope that this doesn’t cause a universe destroying time paradox.
Details, as ever, below the fold…
Algorithms to recognise knots, links and 3-dimensional spaces.
Knots and links were suggested by Lord Kelvin as possible models for atoms. This stimulated research in the 19th Century by Tait and others to classify knots and links. Early tables constructed by hand turned out to be remarkably accurate. A quick discussion will be given on some of the new methods to distinguish knots and links with a focus on the problem of determining when a knot is trivial, i.e. the unknot. A related problem is determining when a 3-dimensional space is the 3-sphere or 3-ball. Knotted DNA has been observed with special enzymes able to break separate the knotted strands of DNA and replicate particular knot types! So enzymes know how to classify knots.
Presenter: Hyam Rubenstein
When: Friday 27th of August, 1pm-2pm
Where: Hercus Theatre, Department of Physics
Web: www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~mums
Free refreshments will be served after the seminar.
