History of knotting History of knotting Knots and knotting have been used and studied throughout history. For example, Chinese knotting is a decorative handicraft art that began as a form of Chinese folk art in the Tang and Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD) in China, later popularized in the Ming. Knot theory is the recent mathematical study of unknots. Knots of ancient origin include the bottle sling, bowline, cat's paw, clove hitch, cow hitch, double fisherman's knot, eskimo bowline, figure-eight knot, fisherman's knot, half hitch, kalmyk loop, one-sided overhand bend, overhand knot, overhand loop, reef knot, running bowline, single hitch, thief knot, Turk's head
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