Re: Classification of tangles - with pictures



Lee Rudolph wrote:
> It appears from a followup that some physicists call
> them tangles, but the most standard term for them is
> "long knots". Look up papers by Ted Stanford, et al.

Can you specify a paper in particular, maybe a review?
Arxiv has many, but they are extremely technical.
(I am physicist-engineer.)

For the object made of one strands I really only meant
an open knot, with the to open ends going to infinity,
like when I tie a knot in an electrical cable and then imagine
letting the ends go to infinity. Is there a collection of
drawings of these things somewhere?
I feel a bit ashamed for asking simples things here.

For the objects with two strands, I just imagined two
such cables, so that in total four ends go to infinity.
Now that I found out about rational tangles (named so
by Conway) locally knotted tangles and prime tangles,
I am looking for a collection of prime tangle figures,
and a simple explanation of their invariants.

But if one puts "prime tangle" into google, the number of hits
is extremely low. So either the name is new, or there is not
much done on the topic.

FB

.