Home /  Mathematics Department Colloquium: A tale of three unknotting conjectures

Seminar

Mathematics Department Colloquium: A tale of three unknotting conjectures March 19, 2026 (04:00 PM PDT - 05:00 PM PDT)
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Location: Evans Hall, 60
Speaker(s) Susan Hermiller (University of Nebraska)
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This seminar series will take place on UC Berkeley campus, in Evans Hall room 60.

Unknotting number is a fundamental measure of how complicated a knot is, measuring how far it is from the unknot via crossing changes. Unknotting number is a challenging invariant to compute; a vast array of tools have been applied to its calculation, and many conjectures have grown up around it. In this talk I will discuss three conjectures, each aimed at simplifying the task of computing unknotting numbers. I will describe how our resolution of one of these conjectures several years ago led us recently to resolve another - the (non)additivity of unknotting number under connected sum. This is joint work with Mark Brittenham.

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