A lower bound for the number of Reidemeister moves of type III

In this article we take up the calculation of the minimum number of colors needed to produce a non-trivial coloring of a knot. This is a knot invariant and we use the torus knots of type (2, n) as our case study. We calculate the minima in some cases. In other cases we estimate upper bounds for these minima leaning on the features of modular arithmetic. We introduce a sequence of transformations on colored diagrams called Teneva Transformations. Each of these Transformations ...

In this paper we introduce a representation of knots and links called a cube diagram. We show that a property of a cube diagram is a link invariant if and only if the property is invariant under two types of cube diagram operations. A knot homology is constructed from cube diagrams and shown to be equivalent to knot Floer homology.

This article concerns exact results on the minimum number of colors of a Fox coloring over the integers modulo r, of a link with non-null determinant. Specifically, we prove that whenever the least prime divisor of the determinant of such a link and the modulus r is 2, 3, 5, or 7, then the minimum number of colors is 2, 3, 4, or 4 (respectively) and conversely. We are thus led to conjecture that for each prime p there exists a unique positive integer, m, with the following pr...

We prove that any diagram of the unknot with c crossings may be reduced to the trivial diagram using at most (236 c)^{11} Reidemeister moves. Moreover, every diagram in this sequence has at most (7 c)^2 crossings. We also prove a similar theorem for split links, which provides a polynomial upper bound on the number of Reidemeister moves required to transform a diagram of the link into a disconnected diagram.

In this paper, we consider minimum numbers of colors of knots for Dehn colorings. In particular, we will show that for any odd prime number $p$ and any Dehn $p$-colorable knot $K$, the minimum number of colors for $K$ is at least $\lfloor \log_2 p \rfloor +2$. Moreover, we will define the $\R$-palette graph for a set of colors. The $\R$-palette graphs are quite useful to give candidates of sets of colors which might realize a nontrivially Dehn $p$-colored diagram. In Appendix...

The minimum number of colors is a challenging knot invariant since, by definition, its calculation requires taking the minimum over infinitely many minima. In this article we estimate and in some cases calculate the minimum number of colors for the Turk's head knots on three strands.

We introduce an up-down coloring of a virtual-link diagram. The colorabilities give a lower bound of the minimum number of Reidemeister moves of type II which are needed between two 2-component virtual-link diagrams. By using the notion of a quandle cocycle invariant, we determine the necessity of Reidemeister moves of type II for a pair of diagrams of the trivial virtual-knot. This implies that for any virtual-knot diagram $D$, there exists a diagram $D'$ representing the sa...

If a knot has the Alexander polynomial not equal to 1, then it is linear $n$-colorable. By means of such a coloring, such a knot is given an upper bound for the minimal quandle order, i.e., the minimal order of a quandle with which the knot is quandle colorable. For twist knots, we study the minimal quandle orders in detail.

We present a sequence of diagrams of the unknot for which the minimum number of Reidemeister moves required to pass to the trivial diagram is quadratic with respect to the number of crossings. These bounds apply both in $S^2$ and in $\R^2$.

We study the Fox coloring invariants of rational knots. We express the propagation of the colors down the twists of these knots and ultimately the determinant of them with the help of finite increasing sequences whose terms of even order are even and whose terms of odd order are odd.