Thursday, May 23 2019, 9am Boyd Room 328 Title: Distortion and the Bridge Distance of Knots Abstract: Distortion is a measure of the complexity of a knot that was first defined by Gromov. Pardon showed that the distortion of a knot is bounded below by a constant multiple of the representativity of the knot. We extend his techniques to show that there is a lower bound on the distortion of a knot proportional to the minimum of the bridge distance and the bridge number of the knot. We also exhibit an infinite family of knots for which the minimum of the bridge distance and the bridge number is unbounded and Pardon’s lower boun
