When Lisa Piccirillo solved a decades-old mystery about the “Conway knot,” she had to overcome the knot’s uncanny ability to hoodwink some of the most powerful tools mathematicians have devised. Known ...

Knot theory, a branch of topology, examines the intricate properties of closed curves embedded in three-dimensional space. At its core is the study of knot invariants—quantitative measures that remain ...

A combination of transformations can sometimes be described using a single transformation, eg when a shape is transformed by two consecutive translations, the result can be expressed as a single ...