Bowline loop may pass around or through an object during the making of the knot. The knot tightens when loaded at (pulled by) the standing part of the line. The bowline is commonly used in sailing small craft, for example to fasten a halyard to the head of a sail or to tie a jib sheet to a clew of a jib. The bowline is well known as a rescue knot for such purposes as rescuing people who might have fallen down a hole, or off a cliff onto a ledge. This knot is particularly useful in such a situation because
Arf invariant of a knot the knot, constructed from a set of curves on a Seifert surface of genus "g" which represent a basis for the first homology of the surface. This means that "V" is a 2"g" × 2"g" matrix with the property that "V" − "V" is a symplectic matrix. The "Arf invariant" of the knot is the residue of Specifically, if formula_3, is a symplectic basis for the intersection form on the Seifert surface, then where formula_5 denotes the positive pushoff of "a". This approach to the Arf invariant is due to Louis Kauffman. We define two knots to be pass equivalent