{"id":107460,"date":"2020-05-22T11:43:27","date_gmt":"2020-05-22T18:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/graduate-student-solves-decades-old-conway-knot-problem"},"modified":"2020-05-22T11:43:27","modified_gmt":"2020-05-22T18:43:27","slug":"graduate-student-solves-decades-old-conway-knot-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/graduate-student-solves-decades-old-conway-knot-problem","title":{"rendered":"Graduate Student Solves Decades-Old Conway Knot Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/graduate-student-solves-decades-old-conway-knot-problem2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In the summer of 2018, at a <a href=\"https:\/\/web.ma.utexas.edu\/conferences\/gompf\/?\">conference<\/a> on low-dimensional topology and geometry, <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.google.com\/view\/lpiccirillo\/home\">Lisa Piccirillo<\/a> heard about a nice little math problem. It seemed like a good testing ground for some techniques she had been developing as a graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI didn\u2019t allow myself to work on it during the day,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause I didn\u2019t consider it to be real math. I thought it was, like, my homework.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The question asked whether the Conway knot \u2014 a snarl discovered more than half a century ago by the legendary mathematician John Horton Conway \u2014 is a slice of a higher-dimensional knot. \u201cSliceness\u201d is one of the first natural questions knot theorists ask about knots in higher-dimensional spaces, and mathematicians had been able to answer it for all of the thousands of knots with 12 or fewer crossings \u2014 except one. The Conway knot, which has 11 crossings, had thumbed its nose at mathematicians for decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the summer of 2018, at a conference on low-dimensional topology and geometry, Lisa Piccirillo heard about a nice little math problem. It seemed like a good testing ground for some techniques she had been developing as a graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin. \u201cI didn\u2019t allow myself to work on it during [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":542,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/542"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}