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Graduate Student Solves Decades-Old Conway Knot Problem

The Quanta Podcast

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The Conway Knot

The Conway knot is topologically slice. Mathematicians could figure out the slice status of all other knots with 12 or fewer crossings, but the Conway knot eluded them. It also had a strange feature that made it immune to every attempt to show it was not smoothly slice. Basically, the Conway knot has a sort of sibling, what's known as a mutant.

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