Today, you are a member of… Knot Not Bad
The first and most important question, Members, to a Knot Mathematician, is to ascertain whether or not a Knot is indeed a Knot or in fact an Unknot. It’s not as easy as one might think, given that ambient-isotoped images can be mighty squiggly. But once you figure out that much and if you find yourself in the company of the former, you can move onto deeper questions that reveal knottiness as a complex and interesting riddle. Is it the sailor’s familiar, such as an Alpine Butterfly Bend? Or it is just a work-a-day Windsor? Or maybe it’s eponymous and infamous, like Alexander Polynomial or Kinoshita-Teraska Knot that mutates into a Conway Knot. Regardless of how much you know about Heergaard Floer Homology or the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, this week, your crossings and linkages will be of far more interest if you invite them into the realm of Euclidean space instead of letting them ball up the head office.