The Knot Book - Softcover

Adams, Colin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0716742195 ISBN 13: 9780716742197

Publisher: W.H.Freeman & Co Ltd, 2000

Synopsis

Over a century old, knot theory is today one of the most active areas of modern mathematics. Its study has led to important applications in DNA research and the synthesis of new molecules. "The Knot Book" makes research in knot theory accessible to a non-specialist audience. Colin Adams starts with the simplest knot (the trivial knot or unknot) and guides readers through increasingly more intricate twists and turns of knot theory, exploring problems and theorems mathematicians can now solve, as well as those that remain open.

About this title

Review

In February 2001, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory announced that they had recorded a simple knot untying itself. Crafted from a chain of nickel-plated steel balls connected by thin metal rods, the three-crossing knot stretched, wiggled, and bent its way out of its predicament--a neat trick worthy of an inorganic Houdini, but more, a critical discovery in how granular and filamentary materials such as strands of DNA and polymers entangle and enfold themselves.

A knot seems a simple, everyday thing, at least to anyone who wears laced shoes or uses a corded telephone. In the mathematical discipline known as topology, knots are anything but simple: at 16 crossings of a "closed curve in space that does not intersect itself anywhere", a knot can take one of 1,388,705 permutations, and more are possible. All this thrills mathematics professor Colin Adams, whose primer The Knot Book offers an engaging if often challenging introduction to the mysterious, often unproven, but, he suggests, ultimately knowable nature of knots of all kinds--whether nontrivial, satellite, torus, cable or hyperbolic. As perhaps befits its subject, Adams's prose is sometimes... well, tangled ("A knot is amphicheiral if it can be deformed through space to the knot obtained by changing every crossing in the projection of the knot to the opposite crossing.") but his book is great fun for puzzle and magic buffs, and a useful reference for students of knot theory and other aspects of higher mathematics. --Gregory McNamee

Review

"Adams is an expert in knot theory, and this shows in the clarity and accuracy of his writing, and in the rich store of examples and problems . . . We are going to see much more of knot theory and its applications, and this book is an excellent place to start." --"Nature"

Edition details

• Publisher: W.H.Freeman & Co Ltd
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0716742195
• ISBN 13: 9780716742197
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 306