The Knot Book: An Elementary Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Knots

Adams, Colin Conrad

ISBN 10: 071672393X / ISBN 13: 9780716723936

Published by W H Freeman & Co, 1994

About this Item

This item is in overall acceptable condition. Covers and dust jackets are intact but may have heavy wear including creases, bends, edge wear, curled corners or minor tears as well as stickers or sticker-residue. Pages are intact but may have minor curls, bends or moderate to considerable highlighting/ writing. Binding is intact; however, spine may have heavy wear. Digital codes may not be included and have not been tested to be redeemable and/or active. A well-read copy overall. Please note that all items are donated goods and are in used condition. Orders shipped Monday through Friday! Your purchase helps put people to work and learn life skills to reach their full potential. Orders shipped Monday through Friday. Your purchase helps put people to work and learn life skills to reach their full potential. Thank you!

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Knot Book: An Elementary Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Knots
• Publisher: W H Freeman & Co
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 071672393X
• ISBN 13: 9780716723936
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Acceptable

About this title

Synopsis

If you are a student of mathematics, a scientist working in fields affected by knot theory research, or a curious amateur who finds mathematics intriguing, The Knot Book is for you. With this engagingly written and illustrated book, you will be working with some of the most advanced ideas in contemporary mathematics.

Review

In February 2001, scientists at the Department of Energy's 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 than that, 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, however, 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 offers an engaging if 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