Buzz
The image below may seem simple to those unfamiliar with knot theory, but it has puzzled mathematicians for years. Now, a graduate student-turned-MIT professor holds the distinction of being the first to solve the Conway Knot in 50 years, according to the Boston Globe.
In 2018, while at the University of Texas, Lisa Piccirillo developed a proof for the Conway Knot in under a week. Her groundbreaking work was published in the Annals of Mathematics earlier this year, and it immediately garnered attention in the math community. On July 1, the 29-year-old began her new role as an assistant professor at MIT.
Saung Tadashi, Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0The Conway Knot is named after John Horton Conway, the English mathematician who discovered this mathematical knot over fifty years ago. A mathematical knot is a tangled figure that appears to be formed from a single continuous line. Knot theory, a branch of topology (the study of objects' unchanging geometric properties), explores how such knots can exist. This mathematical theory has practical applications, including in understanding the structure of the DNA double helix and the shape of the universe.
The Conway Knot is among the most infamous problems in knot theory, characterized by a line that overlaps in 11 distinct points. In knot theory, some knots are "slices," meaning they could be formed by cutting a four-dimensional knotted sphere. It was previously uncertain whether the Conway Knot fell into this category. Piccirillo created her own knot, now known as Piccirillo's knot, using the same four-dimensional shape or "trace" associated with the Conway Knot. Since her knot wasn’t a slice, she concluded that the Conway Knot couldn’t be one either.
Piccirillo graduated from the University of Texas in 2019 and took a postdoctoral role at Brandeis. While most postdoctoral positions last three to four years, Piccirillo was hired by MIT just 14 months after leaving graduate school.
