Planar Diagrams

In the "Planar Diagrams" (PD) presentation we present every knot or link diagram by labeling its edges (with natural numbers, 1,...,n, and with increasing labels as we go around each component) and by a list crossings presented as symbols $X_{ijkl}$ where $i$, $j$, $k$ and $l$ are the labels of the edges around that crossing, starting from the incoming lower edge and proceeding counterclockwise. Thus for example, the PD presentation of the knot on the right is:

File:Img16.gif

(This of course is the Miller Institute knot, the mirror image of the knot File:Img17.gif.)

Figure 2: Our notation for planar diagrams