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Mark Kidwell, a mathematics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who is conducting research at Lafayette, will give a talk on “Two Types of Amphichiral Links” 4 p.m. Monday in Pardee Hall room 217.
Open to the campus community, the talk is part of the Lafayette-Lehigh Geometry & Topology Seminar.
Kidwell studies knots, links, and braids. He received his Ph.D. in 1976 from Yale University under the direction of Ronnie Lee. He has taught at Amherst College and the U.S. Naval Academy, and taken sabbaticals at Columbia, Liverpool, and George Washington Universities, and currently at Lafayette. His wife Peggy is also on sabbatical from her position as curator of mathematics at the Smithsonian Institution, and is writing a book about the material culture of mathematics.
His description of the talk: “We will define component preserving amphichiral (CPA) and component switching amphichiral (CSA) links of two components. We will run through the ‘Mastercard Venn diagram’: which links are just CPA, just CSA, neither, or both? We will use the two-variable Conway potential function to prove that CPA links with nonzero even linking number cannot exist, answering a question of Livingston. We will give new examples of CSA links of linking number four times an odd number. We will display some Laurent polynomials that ought to be potential functions of amphichiral links, but are not yet known to be.”
The next talk in the seminar series on campus will feature Mike McCooey of Franklin & Marshall College Monday, April 12.