Bryn Mawr Mathematicians attend Spring Meeting of the Mathematical Association of America Eastern Section

Bryn Mawr's Mathematics Department was well represented at the Spring 2019 meeting of the Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware (EPaDel) section of the Mathematical Association of America. The conference was held on March 23, 2019 at King's College in Wilkes-Barre, PA. Current graduate students Isaac Craig, Elsa Magness, Dannielle Smiley, and A.J. Vargas attended the event. 

Isaac Craig presented the talk "Knot Traces and Sliceness." His abstract reads: "The 4-manifold obtained by attaching a 0-framed 2-handle to the 4-ball along a knot is called the trace of the knot. Among its many applications to low-dimensional topology, this manifold can be used to obstruct when a knot is slice (bounds a smoothly embedded disk in the 4-ball), since any knot whose trace is diffeomorphic to the trace of a slice knot is necessarily slice. As a result, we are interested in methods which construct such pairs of knots. In this talk, we will repackage one such construction used in Lisa Piccirillo's 2018 paper 'The Conway knot is not slice'."