Set Theoretic Yang-Baxter Solutions via Fox Calculus

Knot Theory: from Fox 3-colorings of links to Yang-Baxter homology and Khovanov homology

This paper is an extended account of my "Introductory Plenary talk at Knots in Hellas 2016" conference We start from the short introduction to Knot Theory from the historical perspective, starting from Heraclas text (the first century AD), mentioning R.Llull (1232-1315), A.Kircher (1602-1680), Leibniz idea of Geometria Situs (1679), and J.B.Listing (student of Gauss) work of 1847. We spend some space on Ralph H. Fox (1913-1973) elementary introduction to diagram colorings (1956). In the second section we describe how Fox work was generalized to distributive colorings (racks and quandles) and e…

Twisting Kuperberg invariants via Fox calculus and Reidemeister torsion

We study Kuperberg invariants for sutured manifolds in the case of a semidirect product of an involutory Hopf superalgebra $H$ with its automorphism group $\text{Aut}(H)$. These are topological invariants of balanced sutured 3-manifolds endowed with a homomorphism of the fundamental group into $\text{Aut}(H)$ and possibly with a $\text{Spin}^c$ structure and a homology orientation. We show that these invariants are computed via a form of Fox calculus and that, if $H$ is $\mathbb{N}$-graded, they can be extended in a canonical way to polynomial invariants. When $H$ is an exterior algebra, we sh…

Thurston norm via Fox calculus

In 1976 Thurston associated to a $3$-manifold $N$ a marked polytope in $H_1(N;\mathbb{R}),$ which measures the minimal complexity of surfaces representing homology classes and determines all fibered classes in $H^1(N;\mathbb{R})$. Recently the first and the last author associated to a presentation $π$ with two generators and one relator a marked polytope in $H_1(π;\mathbb{R})$ and showed that it determines the Bieri-Neumann-Strebel invariant of $π$. In this paper, we show that if the fundamental group of a 3-manifold $N$ admits such a presentation $π$, then the corresponding marked polytopes i…

Two-generator one-relator groups and marked polytopes

We use Fox calculus to assign a marked polytope to a `nice' group presentation with two generators and one relator. Relating the marked vertices to Novikov-Sikorav homology we show that they determine the Bieri-Neumann-Strebel invariant of the group. Furthermore we show that in many cases the marked polytope is an invariant of the underlying group and that in those cases the marked polytope also determines the minimal complexity of all the associated HNN-splittings.

Knot Floer 同调、Burau 表示与量子 $\mathfrak{gl}(1 \vert 1)$

Knot Floer Homology, the Burau Representation, and Quantum $\mathfrak{gl}(1 \vert 1)$

本文通过 Fox 微积分建立 Burau 表示与 Knot Floer 同调的明确联系，定义范畴化行列式的不变量，并利用量子 $\mathfrak{gl}(1 \vert 1)$ 证明其恢复辫表示。

Lefschetz fibrations, intersection numbers, and representations of the framed braid group

We examine the action of the fundamental group $Γ$ of a Riemann surface with $m$ punctures on the middle dimensional homology of a regular fiber in a Lefschetz fibration, and describe to what extent this action can be recovered from the intersection numbers of vanishing cycles. Basis changes for the vanishing cycles result in a nonlinear action of the framed braid group $\widetilde{\mathcal B}$ on $m$ strings on a suitable space of $m\times m$ matrices. This action is determined by a family of cohomologous 1-cocycles ${\mathcal S}_c:\widetilde{\mathcal B}\to GL_m({\mathbb{Z}}[Γ])$ parametrized…