How many knots can you tie?
While at the
LSA's annual meeting this past weekend, I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a knot theorist from Harvard.
I of course immediately asked him how many knots he could tie.
He said just two, which was a bit of a disappointment, as was his inordinate
fascination with that boring old shoe-tying knot that everyone above the age of
three knows well. What's more, he had no idea why some
knots are stronger than others. He brushed this off as a problem
in physics.
This is all that I was able to learn about the inner lives of knot theorists:
I had to go hear
a talk about
be.
Posted by Christopher Potts at January 13, 2004 10:35 PM