Granny knot its possible use tying the necks of grain sacks. When attempting to tie a reef knot (square knot), it is easy to produce a granny knot accidentally. This is dangerous because the granny knot can slip when heavily loaded. A tightened granny knot can also jam and is often more difficult to untie than the reef knot. It is better to tie a reef knot in nearly all circumstances. One way to distinguish them is that in the reef knot each loop passes completely over, or completely under (not through) the neck of the other. The reef knot is commonly
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