Nakanishi's 4-move conjecture for knots
Nakanishi's 4-move conjecture for knots
A 4-move is the local operation on a link diagram that replaces four consecutive half-twists between two strands by the opposite four half-twists. Nakanishi's 4-move conjecture. Every knot can be reduced to the trivial knot by 4-moves. This conjecture is an early move-equivalence conjecture in knot theory, formulated by Nakanishi in 1979 before the 3-move conjecture was formally stated; the supplied evidence says it is disproved by the -cable of the figure-eight knot with a half-twist, a knot with 17 crossings.
Sources & referencesView supporting material
Primary source
Rhea Palak Bakshi, Benjamin A. Burton, Huizheng Guo, Dionne Ibarra, Gabriel Montoya-Vega, Sujoy Mukherjee and Józef H. Przytycki, “The Montesinos-Nakanishi 3-move conjecture for links up to 20 crossings”, arXiv:2502.17711 (2025).
Additional references
5 papers in this index state this conjecture (2001–2025). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:math/0601004, arXiv:math/0312527, arXiv:math/0303012, arXiv:math/0109029.
Progress summary
Nothing recorded yet. Refresh searches the literature and the public web for attempts on this problem, and writes the first summary here.
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