Notation and Basic Facts in Knot Theory
Appendix A Notation and Basic Facts in Knot Theory In this appendix, our aim is to provide a quick review of basic terminology and some facts in knot theory, which we use or need in this book. This appendix lists them item by item (without proof); so we do no attempt to give a full rigorous treatments; Instead, we work somewhat intuitively. The reader with interest in the details could consult the textbooks [BZ, R, Lic, KawBook]. • First, we fix notation on the circle S1 := {(x, y) ∈ R2 | x2 + y2 = 1}, and consider a finite disjoint union S1. A link is a C∞-embedding of L :S1 → S3 in the 3-sphere. We denote often by #L the number of the disjoint union, and denote the image Im(L) by only L for short. If #L is 1, L is usually called a knot, and is written K instead. This book discusses embeddings together with orientation. For an oriented link L, we denote by −L the link with its orientation reversed, and by L∗ the mirror image of L. • (Notations of link components). Given a link L :S1 → S3, let us fix an open tubular neighborhood νL ⊂ S3. Throughout this book, we denote the complement S3 \ νL by S3 \ L for short. Since we mainly discuss isotopy classes of S3 \ L,we may ignore the choice of νL. 2 • For example, for integers s, t ∈ Z , the torus link Ts,t (of type (s, t)) is defined by 3 2 s t 2 2 S Ts,t := (z,w)∈ C z + w = 0, |z| +|w| = 1 .
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