# Is there a periodic table for knots?

When I see knot tables, I have two feeling: ah, it's beautiful, and... painful.

I don't see how knots are ordered in the knot table, the way to go from one knot of a certain crossing number to another seems to be completely random. But I would guess there are some order? For example, why are the Perko pair put next to each other even before people knew they are the same?

In short, if the word "periodic table" seems confusing, my real question is, how are the knots in knot table ordered?

-
If you're referring to the knot table at the back of Rolfsen's book (sometimes also called the Conway table) the ordering is first on the number of crossings and then if the knots have the same number of crossings they're listed in the order they were discovered. –  Ryan Budney Dec 3 '11 at 18:44
Not really. If you want to make that analogy, you have to talk about a specific "periodic" quality of knots. What would that quality be? Your question seems to be based on the idea that knots should be somehow comparable to atoms, but you haven't told us why you think that should be. –  Ryan Budney Dec 3 '11 at 19:59
There are a bunch of ways you could try to make some kind of periodic table of knots. Using geometrization you'd first have the three primary families: torus, hyperbolic and satellite. Torus knots could be listed by the integers $(p,q)$ that specify them. Hyperbolic knots by their volumes. Two hyperbolic knots of the same volume would have to be sorted in some way, I'm not sure if there's a good way. And satellite knots could be sorted lexicographically from the base of their JSJ-tree upwards. But then this "table" would have a pretty strong bias towards the 3-manifolds view of knots. –  Ryan Budney Dec 3 '11 at 20:04
does katlas.org/wiki/Main_Page help ? –  David Lehavi Dec 3 '11 at 20:42
Along the lines of Ryan's comment, here is a table of hyperbolic knots: math.unl.edu/~mbrittenham2/ldt/knots/knot11cr.ps –  Daniel Moskovich Dec 3 '11 at 23:23

Just for kicks, here's a partial list of various ways some people like to occasionally think of as ways of sorting knots.

• Knot energies. For example, the electrostatic potential on knots in $S^3$ is a real-valued function on the space of knots in $S^3$ such that there's only finitely-many knot types below any given energy level. See papers of Freedman, He and Wang, also Jun O'Hara. But there are many other knot energies out there in the literature.

• Crossing number + ??. The traditional knot table. Closely related are things like bridge numbers. Minimal number of tetrahedra in a triangulation of the complement. Stick number. Degree of a polynomial or trig function that it takes to represent the knot, and so on.

• Geometrization + the geometrization of the 2-sheeted cyclic branched cover of $(S^3,K)$. This is related to "arborescent knots". Similarly, this leads to all kinds of variant ideas. See the big paper of Bonahon and Siebenmann. This is also related to rational tangle decompositions of knots.