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A simple way to measure knots has come unraveled
Two mathematicians have proved that a straightforward question — how hard is it to untie a knot? — has a complicated answer.
The conjecture dates back to at least 1937, when the German mathematician Hilmar Wendt set out to understand what happens when you add knots together — that is, when you tie both of them with the same string before gluing the ends together. Susan Hermiller (left) and Mark Brittenham disproved a decades-old conjecture about knots, complicating mathematicians’ understanding of these seemingly simple objects. He and Hermiller already had the perfect tool for the occasion humming away on their suite of laptops: the database they’d spent the previous decade developing, with its upper bounds on the unknotting numbers of thousands of knots.
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