Friday 31 July 2015

Analysing some knots


I've been reading more of Matt Parker's book on maths. I wasn't aware that Lord Kelvin had proposed the idea that matter consisted of knots in the ether, at a time before the existence of atoms was proven and when it was still believed that the ether permeated the whole universe. The idea was that each element was a different knot. So the study of knots was started. I've done my first, shown above. It is the simplest possible knot but not as simple as  thought when loosened slightly. It's called a trefoil knot and has 3 crossovers. More to follow!