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Surgery Description Of Colored Knots, Steven Daniel Wallace

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

By a knot, or link, we mean a circle, or a collection of circles, embedded in the three-sphere S3. The study of knots is a very rich subject and plays a key role in the area of low-dimensional topology. In fact, a theorem of W.B.R. Lickorish and A.D. Wallace states that any three-dimensional manifold may be described by Dehn surgery along a link which is the process of removing the link from S3 and then gluing it back in a way that possibly changes the resulting manifold. In this dissertation, we will be interested in the pair (K, ρ) consisting …