There are several options for the user to enter a knot/link: 1) As a braid closure, as you mentioned. 2) By means of a Gauss code, Dowker-Thistlethwaite Notation or some other similar codification of its planar diagram. For example, there is a way to codify a link diagram as a planar representation of a graph. 3) By a list of three dimensional vertices that determine a piecewise linear curve (or several of them, if we are talking about links). In principle it could also be done by better aproximations of the curve (splines or bezier curves), but i think for this purpose just piecewise linear is fine. This kind of input would be important if we want it to be usable over real world problems, since it is sometimes the case that the knot is obtained from experimental data. There is a R package that works with this kind of input [1]. 4) If an interactive editor is integrated in the notebook (like the graph editor for example), by drawing it.
One of the goals of the project would be to translate between this different possible representations. [1] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Rknots/index.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-gsoc" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-gsoc. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
