activity
20242026
collaborators

6 papers

math.GT2026

Danceability, A New Definition of Bridge Index

Sol Addison, Sarah Blackwell, Puttipong Pongtanapaisan +3

There are many commonly known definitions of the bridge index coming from combinatorial knot theory, Morse theory, geometry, and algebra. In this paper, we prove that the danceabil…

math.GT2026

Pants distances of knotted surfaces in 4-manifolds

Román Aranda, Sarah Blackwell, Devashi Gulati +4

We define a pants distance for knotted surfaces in 4-manifolds, which generalizes the complexity studied by Blair-Campisi-Taylor-Tomova for surfaces in the 4-sphere. We determine t…

math.GT2026

Bridge position of 3-manifolds embedded in the 5-sphere

Román Aranda, Sarah Blackwell, Geunyoung Kim +2

We introduce and study bridge decompositions for 3-manifolds embedded in the 5-sphere. These generalize both the classical notion of bridge position for knots in the 3-sphere and t…

math.GT2025

Bridge indices of spatial graphs and diagram colorings

Sarah Blackwell, Puttipong Pongtanapaisan, Hanh Vo

We extend the Wirtinger number of links, an invariant originally defined by Blair, Kjuchukova, Velazquez, and Villanueva in terms of extending initial colorings of some strands of…

math.GT2024

Constructing Lagrangians from triple grid diagrams

Sarah Blackwell, David T. Gay, Peter Lambert-Cole

Links in can be encoded by grid diagrams; a grid diagram is a collection of points on a toroidal grid such that each row and column of the grid contains exactly two points. G…

math.GT2024

A group-theoretic framework for low-dimensional topology

Sarah Blackwell, Robion Kirby, Michael Klug +2

A correspondence, by way of Heegaard splittings, between closed oriented 3-manifolds and pairs of surjections from a surface group to a free group has been studied by Stallings, Ja…