Using the LinKnot package

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Revision as of 17:18, 21 February 2006 by 87.116.175.209 (talk)
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The Mathematica package LinKnot is a combination of two packages. The first, "Knot2000" was written by M.Ochiai and N.Imafuji. This was extended to the package LinKnot by S. Jablan and R. Sazdanovic. This package provides many useful things KnotTheory can't do natively; for example, it can interpret Conway notation, and, at least on Windows machines, provides nice graphics for knots, and a graphical interface for drawing knots by hand.

To use LinKnot with KnotTheory, you should download LinKnot.zip from [1] (a full LinKnot manual page ManualK2KC.nb is in the zip file, in the main file is the mathematica notebook K2KL.nb). Install this wherever you like, and in your Mathematica session issue a command like

(For In[1] see Setup)

In[2]:= AppendTo[$Path, "/path/to/LinKnots.m"];

After you've done this, everything should just work. (LinKnot will only be loaded when necessary, and there might be a short delay when this happens.) If everything doesn't just work, please complain to Scott.

You may find it helpful to explicitly set the path in which you've installed LinKnot (although KnotTheory tries to do this itself). Simply set LinKnotDirectory[].

In[3]:= ?LinKnotDirectory
LinKnotDirectory[] contains the path to the ''LinKnot'' package. It must be set correctly in order for all the (Windows only) MathLink components of ''LinKnot'' to be usable. It can be overriden by the user.