Hello everyone,

Today's seminar will use the same link as last week:

meet.google.com/bqo-wbtp-gzj

Thomas Kindred from University of Nebraska will be joining us. His title and abstract are below:

A geometric proof of the flyping theorem Speaker: Thomas Kindred, University of Nebraska Date: Sep 9, 2020 Time: 3:45 PM Room: Virtual meeting Abstract: In 1898, Tait asserted several properties of alternating knot diagrams. These assertions came to be known as Tait’s conjectures and remained open through the discovery of the Jones polynomial in 1985. The new polynomial invariants soon led to proofs of all of Tait’s conjectures, culminating in 1993 with Menasco-Thistlethwaite’s proof of Tait’s flyping conjecture.

In 2017, Greene gave the first geometric proof of part of Tait’s conjectures, while also answering a longstanding question of Fox by characterizing alternating links geometrically; Howie independently answered Fox’s question with a related characterization. I will use these new characterizations, among other techniques, to give the first entirely geometric proof of Menasco-Thistlethwaite’s Flyping Theorem.

______________________ Neil R. Hoffman Assistant Professor Department of Mathematics 523 Math Science Building Oklahoma State University Stillwater, OK 74078-1058 405-744-7791 http://math.okstate.edu/people/nhoffman