Geometry & Topology Seminar

Duncan McCoy, Université du Québec à Montréal

"The quest for alternating surgeries"

Dehn surgery is an operation where one constructs a 3-manifold by taking a knot in the 3-sphere, cutting out a tubular neighbourhood and then gluing in another solid torus. We say that a Dehn surgery is an “alternating surgery” if it produces a manifold which arises as the double branched cover of an alternating link. I will try to justify why alternating surgeries are interesting and explain some of what is known about them. In particular, I will discuss the existence of an algorithm to calculate all possible alternating surgeries on a given knot and describe the results of implementing such an algorithm. This is joint work with Ken Baker and Marc Kegel.

MC 5417