Rational Witt classes of pretzel knots
by
Stanislav Jabuka
University of Nevada, Reno

In his seminal work on the algebraic concordance groups, Jerry Levine introduced a complete set of invariants of algebraic knot concordance. While these invariants completely determined the algebraic concordance order of a knot, they are often difficult to calculate, especially when the degree of the Alexander polynomial becomes large.

To circumvent these computational obstacles, we consider instead a weaker set of invariants of algebraic concordance - the rational Witt classes of knots. While carrying less information than Levine's invariants, they are readily computed in many families of examples. We will illustrate this point by determining the rational Witt classes of pretzel knots with an arbitrary odd number of strands.

Date received: May 15, 2008

Copyright © 2008 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # caxb-20.