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A nonorientable version of the Milnor Conjecture (Cornelia A. Van Cott, USF)
February 21, 2019 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
In 1968, Milnor famously conjectured that the smooth 4-genus of the torus knot T(p,q) is given by (p-1)(q-1)/2. This conjecture was first verified by Kronheimer and Mrowka in 1993 and has received several other proofs since then. In this talk, we discuss a nonorientable analogue of this conjecture, first formulated by Josh Batson. We prove the conjecture for infinite families of of torus knots, using tools from knot Floer homology. We also connect the problem to the world of continued fractions, which gives an alternative perspective on the problem. This is joint work with Stanislav Jabuka.