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Knotted ribbons form an important topic in knot theory. They have applications in natural sciences, such as cyclic duplex DNA modeling. A flat knotted ribbon can be obtained by gently pulling a knotted ribbon tight so that it becomes flat and folded. An important problem in knot theory is to study the minimal ratio of length to width of a flat knotted ribbon. This minimal ratio is called the ribbonlength of the knot. It has been conjectured that the ribbonlength has an upper bound and a lower bound which are both linear in the crossing number of the knot. In the first part of the paper, we use grid diagrams to construct flat knotted ribbons and prove an explicit quadratic upper bound on the ribbonlength for all non-trivial knots. We then improve the quadratic upper bound to a linear upper bound for all non-trivial torus knots and twist knots. Our approach of using grid diagrams to study flat knotted ribbons is novel and can likely be used to obtain a linear upper bound for more general families of knots. In the second part of the paper, we obtain a sharper linear upper bound on the ribbonlength for nontrivial twist knots by constructing a flat knotted ribbon via folding the ribbon over itself multiple times to shorten the length.

The Hamiltonian cycle problem is an important problem in graph theory and computer science. It is a special case of the famous traveling salesman problem. A signicant amount of research has been done on the special cases of nding Hamiltonian cycles in subgraphs of triangular, square and hexagonal grids. However, there is little work on more complicated grids. In this paper, we investigate the hardness of Hamiltonian cycle problem in grid graphs of semiregular tessellations, which are tessellations formed by two or more kinds of regular polygons. There are only eight semiregular tessellations, and we prove that the Hamiltonian cycle problem in all of them are NP-complete by reducing from NP-complete problems, such as the Hamiltonian cycle problem in max degree 3 bipartite planar graphs. Knowing the NP-completeness of Hamiltonian cycle problem in semiregular grids indicates that there will not be any polynomial time algorithm that solves the Hamiltonian path problem in these tessellations if NP does not equal to P, which helps show the limits of ecient motion planning algorithms and provides new information about what makes problems computationally dicult to solve.

No abstract uploaded!

No abstract uploaded!