Knot tabulation

Ever since Sir William Thomson's vortex theory, mathematicians have tried to classify and tabulate all possible knots. By 1998, all 1.7 million prime knots up to 16 crossings had been tabulated, and by 2020 all 350 million knots up to 19 crossings had been tabulated. The major challenge of the process is that many apparently different knots may actually be different geometrical presentations of the same topological entity, and that proving or disproving knot equivalence is much more difficult than it at first seems.

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