It’s required learning in the Boy Scouts, Sailing Certifications, and to become a Navy SEAL (where you have to tie it underwater while holding your breath). This is probably one of the most important knots to learn. I will be covering two basic knots that are useful in a variety of situations. It’s best to master a few then move on to more complex knots. Another good point is to use cordage with ample strength for the job, because knots will reduce the ropes breaking strength Different knots have their own properties that make them better suited for certain tasks. It’s not as attractive as building fires or catching fish but it’s useful in camping, survival, and even more so in everyday life. Knot tying is one of the most over looked skill sets in my opinion. I’m sure you’ve seen all too often a nice rig on the trail with a spider web of unsightly knots securing gear to the roof rack. It’s a language by which much of science and technology is really described.There’s an old saying, “If you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot”. In some senses, it’s just learning a language. “I didn’t realize that mathematics is such a powerful area. “For me, part of the reason I didn’t think about math was because in high school, even into my first year of college, I didn’t know what a math person did,” said Hughes. Hughes’s students will realize-with the help of rubber tubes, artificial intelligence, and a sturdy clove hitch-that math is much more than tedious checklists of predetermined functions. you have a math major working on a research problem and you are able to discover something cool together.” “Sometimes it’s engineering students or other students who aren’t math majors, but when you help them and see something click with them, that’s exciting,” said Hughes.
For Hughes, one of the greatest benefits of teaching is to show students how rewarding the field can be. Hughes recently took up a permanent position with the BYU Mathematics Department after working for three years as a visiting assistant professor. Hughes hopes to teach knot theory and develop new research techniques while at BYU.
“One of the things that I am trying to do is to see if I can use methods from machine learning and artificial intelligence to teach a computer to recognize certain properties and to solve certain problems,” Hughes said. Because of this, Hughes is developing new computational processes to pick apart the knot complexity. Without the benefit of hyperdimensional rope (which, unfortunately, doesn’t exist), studying these topological knots can be tricky. If you can understand knots, then it allows you to describe and understand 3- and 4-dimensional shapes in a way that is difficult otherwise.” If you are interested in studying shapes that are 3- or 4-dimensional, it turns out that a lot of their structure can be encoded in knottedness. “The reason I am interested in knots primarily is because of their relation to higher dimensional shapes. “Physicists use knots in string theory,” said Hughes. “I can never take this and end up with just a perfect circle a hula hoop without cutting it in some way.”īut what good is a theoretical knot that can’t even keep a Boy Scout’s food out of the reach of bears? “It doesn’t matter if I twist it around or something, there is still this knottedness along here that is inherent in it,” said Hughes. Hughes demonstrates the property of knottedness to his students by tugging on a long rubber tube that has been looped over itself, knotted, and connected at the ends to form a closed circle. You get a closed loop, but you potentially could have something knotted along the loop.” Imagine that you take a piece of rubber or a string and instead of leaving the two ends open you attached the two ends together. Now instead of tying two separate pieces of string together, a knot in mathematics is a loop-a closed loop. “One of the areas I study is called knot theory,” said Hughes “Think of a Boy Scout tying a knot: you take two strings and you tie them together so that they are tight. Certain properties (like the connectedness between those two points) will never change. Stretch it, twist it, bend it, inflate it, deflate it-it doesn’t matter. If you draw a line between any two points on the balloon, it doesn’t matter what shape you contort the balloon into-those two points will always be connected by that line.
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