Letters Laparoscopic removal of abdominal cervical suture Editor, Cervical incompetence is diagnosed in 0.1-1% of all pregnancies and in 8% of women with repeated (two or more) mid-trimester pregnancy loss. 1 Cervical cerclage should be offered to patients with three or more pregnancies ending before 37 weeks gestation 2 as there is a strong body of clinical evidence suggesting that cervical ce...

Suppose that a hyperbolic knot in S admits a finite surgery, Boyer and Zhang proved that the surgery slope must be either integral or halfintegral, and they conjectured that the latter case does not happen. Using the correction terms in Heegaard Floer homology, we prove that if a hyperbolic knot in S admits a half-integral finite surgery, then the knot must have the same knot Floer homology as ...

We give a new geometric obstruction to the iterated Bing double of a knot being a slice link: for n > 1 the (n + 1)st iterated Bing double of a knot is rationally slice if and only if the nth iterated Bing double of the knot is rationally slice. The main technique of the proof is a covering link construction simplifying a given link. We prove certain similar geometric obstructions for n ≤ 1 as ...

The accidental untying of a shoelace while walking often occurs without warning. In this paper, we discuss the series of events that lead to a shoelace knot becoming untied. First, the repeated impact of the shoe on the floor during walking serves to loosen the knot. Then, the whipping motions of the free ends of the laces caused by the leg swing produce slipping of the laces. This leads to eve...

We give a classification of irreducible metabelian representations from a knot group into SL(n,C) and GL(n,C). If the homology of the n–fold branched cover of the knot is finite, we show that every irreducible metabelian SL(n,C) representation is conjugate to a unitary representation and that the set of conjugacy classes of such representations is finite. In that case, we give a formula for thi...

Isogeometric cohesive elements are presented for modeling two and three dimensional delaminated composite structures. We exploit the knot insertion algorithm offered by NURBS (Non Uniform Rational B-splines) to generate cohesive elements along delamination planes in an automatic fashion. A complete computational framework is presented including pre-processing, processing and post-processing. Th...

This article pursues the study of the knot state asymptotics in the large level limit initiated in [CM11]. As a main result, we prove the Witten asymptotic expansion conjecture for the Dehn fillings of the figure eight knot. The state of a knot is defined in the realm of Chern-Simons topological quantum field theory as a holomorphic section on the SU2character manifold of the peripheral torus. ...

We study cobordisms and cobordisms rel boundary of PL locally-flat disk knots Dn−2 ↪→ Dn. Any two disk knots are cobordant if the cobordisms are not required to fix the boundary sphere knots , and any two even-dimensional disk knots with isotopic boundary knots are cobordant rel boundary. However, the cobordism rel boundary theory of odd-dimensional disk knots is more subtle. Generalizing resul...

Multi-degree splines are piecewise polynomial functions having sections of different degrees. They offer significant advantages over the classical uniform-degree framework, as they allow for modeling complex geometries with fewer degrees freedom and, at same time, a more efficient engineering analysis. Moreover possess set basis similar properties to standard B-splines. In this paper we develop...