Blog

I was introduced to Keith Conrad when taking my first course in Abstract Algebra. His expository papers in Group and Ring theory were incredibly useful to me, and beyond that I was able to investigate so much more beyond course content in a digestible way. If you have not had the pleasure of perusing his expository papers, I encourage you to do so (they are all posted here )!

I first encountered J. Conway’s notation for knots the way I imagine most people do, by reading his original article “An enumeration of knots and links, and some of their algebraic properties.” While this was sufficient for a basic understanding, I found that the notation had evolved somewhat since 1970. I could not find a single convenient source covering common conventions, or the extensions discussed by A. Caudron in his paper “Classification des noeuds et des enlacements” (written completely in French).