Topology: “The word problem for quandles”

Dr. Rena Levitt, Pomona College

Tuesday, February 19, 2013
  11:10 a.m.–Noon

In 1911 Max Dehn stated his now famous word problem: given a finitely generated group G is there an algorithm to determine if two words in the generators represent the same element in G? While stated in group theoretic terms, Dehn's motivation for the word problem came from the study knot groups and surface groups. In this talk, I will discuss a natural generalization of Dehn's word problem to finitely generated quandles, and show that the word problem is solvable for both free and knot-like quandles. The algorithm we define is similar to Dehn's original method for the fundamental groups of surfaces with genus at least two. This is joint work with Sam Nelson.