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Contributions To Quandle Theory: A Study Of F-Quandles, Extensions, And Cohomology, Indu Rasika U. Churchill

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Quandles are distributive algebraic structures that were introduced by David Joyce [24] in his Ph.D. dissertation in 1979 and at the same time in separate work by Matveev [34]. Quandles can be used to construct invariants of the knots in the 3-dimensional space and knotted surfaces in 4-dimensional space. Quandles can also be studied on their own right as any non-associative algebraic structures.

In this dissertation, we introduce f-quandles which are a generalization of usual quandles. In the first part of this dissertation, we present the definitions of f-quandles together with examples, and properties. Also, we provide a …