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Where the Wild Things Are 2:
A Talk About Knot Theory [IFf-L13]
By Ken Millett

In collaboration with Cabinet magazine,
the IFF presents a lecture

at The Drawing Center in NY.

Thursday March 2 at 7:00pm

For reservations please go to Cabinet’s website
An interview with Dr Millett is also featured in the current issue of Cabinet (#20).

In mathematical lore, a topologist is a person who can’t tell the difference between a coffee cup and a donut, both objects being topologically the same. Of the many things topologists strive to categorize, one of the more enigmatic is knots. Though knotting is one of humanity’s oldest and most widespread activities, being documented in almost every culture on earth, at first glance it seems an unlikely subject for the formalisms of mathematics. But at the end of the nineteenth century mathematicians began to classify these twisted and braided forms, leading to a vast taxonomy of the species, whose members include the unknot, ideal knots, tame knots and wild knots.

In this lecture, Dr. Ken Millett, a leading knot theorist and professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will discuss the history, theory, and taxonomy of knots. As mathematicians have strived to categorize knots they have developed a wide range of techniques for representing and diagramming these enigmatic forms; Dr Millett will explore the diversity of these methods which capture the logic of knotty structures in images at once visually striking and rigorously informed. Today, the insights of knot theory are being bought to bear on understanding the structure of macromolecules and to fundamental issues in theoretical physics, including string theory.

The event will include hands-on activities making knots and attempting to answer such questions as how much rope is required to make a specific knot, and how can we determine if two seemingly disparate knots might really be the same.