collaborators

6 papers

math.GT2026

Incompressible surfaces, hierarchies and unknot recognition

Marc Lackenby

We present a new algorithm to determine whether a compact orientable surface properly embedded in a compact orientable 3-manifold is incompressible. As a special case, this provide…

math.GT2026

Some fast algorithms for curves in surfaces

Marc Lackenby

We present some algorithms that provide useful topological information about curves in surfaces. One of the main algorithms computes the geometric intersection number of two proper…

math.GT2025

Bounds for the number of moves between pants decompositions, and between triangulations

Marc Lackenby, Mehdi Yazdi

Given two pants decompositions of a compact orientable surface , we give an upper bound for their distance in the pants graph that depends logarithmically on their intersection…

math.CO2025

On graphs, homology bases, and triangulated homology spheres

Karim Adiprasito, Marc Lackenby, Juan Souto +1

We describe a construction that takes as input a graph and a basis for its first homology, and returns a triangulation of a 3-dimensional homology sphere. This makes precise an ide…

math.GT2025

The unknotting number, hard unknot diagrams, and reinforcement learning

Taylor Applebaum, Sam Blackwell, Alex Davies +5

We have developed a reinforcement learning agent that often finds a minimal sequence of unknotting crossing changes for a knot diagram with up to 200 crossings, hence giving an upp…

cs.LG2025

What makes a good feedforward computational graph?

Alex Vitvitskyi, João G. M. Araújo, Marc Lackenby +1

As implied by the plethora of literature on graph rewiring, the choice of computational graph employed by a neural network can make a significant impact on its downstream performan…