Linking number
Named by 10 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.
Two loops and one number
Give each crossing between two closed curves a sign, add them up, halve — and the answer does not depend on how the curves were drawn, how they are pushed about, or which way the picture was projected.
Zero can mean two different things
The linking number counts how often one loop pierces a surface the other one bounds. Two punctures of opposite sign add to nothing, and a loop that never goes through adds to nothing as well — so the answer zero is two pictures wearing one number.
Linked, and no two of them are
Three rings that cannot be pulled apart, in which every pair comes apart the moment the third is removed. Every pairwise linking number is zero, so the number cannot see it — and what does see it is a word in two letters that refuses to cancel.
A ball whose outside is not one
Alexander's sphere separates space into two pieces, exactly as the theorem promises. Its inside is an ordinary ball. Its outside is not, and the obstruction is a tree of clasped horns whose tips never stop.
The circles that fill a three-sphere
A three-sphere is filled by circles — one through every point, no two meeting, every two linked exactly once. Stereographic projection is the only way anybody sees it, and the projected picture is a nest of circles on tori whose linking can be counted off the drawing.
A whole number split into two that are not
Run a ribbon round a closed loop and its two edges link a whole number of times. That number is shared between two quantities that are nothing like whole numbers: how far the ribbon twists about its core, and how far the core coils about itself. Bend the loop and the twist and the coiling trade continuously, to three decimal places, while their sum stays fixed — the arithmetic behind a coiled telephone cord and a supercoiled loop of DNA.
Six points in space and a pair that must link
Put six points anywhere in space and join every pair with a straight segment. Split the six into two triangles — there are ten ways — and at least one of the ten pairs of triangles is linked like two rings of a chain. No placement avoids it. The reason is a parity: moving an edge through another changes exactly two of the ten linking numbers, so their sum stays odd whatever is done.
Seven graphs that must link
Six points joined in every way cannot be placed in space without two disjoint triangles hooking together. Trade any triangle for a three-pointed star, or a star back for a triangle, and the property survives; doing it in every possible way from K₆ reaches exactly seven graphs, the Petersen graph among them, and stops. Every placement of every one of them links, by the same parity count. Remove any edge from any of them, and placements that link nothing appear at once. The seven are the whole answer: a graph must link exactly when it contains one of them.
Every loop of the butterfly links every other
The Lorenz equations have infinitely many periodic orbits, each a closed loop winding round the two lobes in its own order. Name each loop by that order — LR, LLR, LLRLR — and the linking number of any two can be read off the names, without solving anything: it is half the number of times a left-going strand passes a right-going one. Every such crossing has the same sign, so every pair of loops links, positively. Computing forty-five pairs from the equations themselves, the Gauss integral lands on the predicted whole number every time.
Torus knots that fill the three-sphere
Hopf filled the three-sphere with circles, every two linked once. Let the circles turn at two different speeds instead — p turns one way while they make q the other — and the three-sphere is filled with (p, q) torus knots, trefoils when p and q are 2 and 3, every two of them linked exactly pq times. Two exceptional fibres remain plain circles; every knot links them q and p times, and they link each other once. Computed from the drawn curves for ten fibrations, every pair comes out at pq to six decimal places.
Named alongside it
The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.
KnotWinding numberInvariantFibrationOrientationParityStereographic projectionTorusBorromean ringsBrunnian linkCantor setCommutator