Talk:Figure eight knot
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I think a knot theorist would say that a knot that looks like the figure eight is the trivial knot, ot the unknot. You just take a cirle and twist it in the middle and you have an eight, no? AxelBoldt
- That does confuse some people, sure. But the figure-eight knot isn't defined as "a knot that looks like the figure eight". And if you take a look at the Figure-eight knot, you'll see that it indeed looks like a figure eight--with a band passed through one of the loops to prevent untwisting it into the unknot. 35.11.50.219 22:37, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Disambiguation
I hope nobody minds, but I have made this page a disambiguation page. Mainly, the number of references to this page have been increasingly mathematical. One reason is that I've been using the term "figure eight knot" in some math articles I create; however, this is standardized terminology in knot theory, whereas it appears to me that "figure-of-eight knot" is just as common as "figure eight knot" for the real world object. So I've taken advantage of this difference in terminology to direct stuff appropriately.
I've kept occurrences of figure eight knot referring to the real world object in place ([[figure-of-eight knot|figure eight knot]], when the reference is in an article on another knot of a similar name, e.g. double figure eight., but in other cases I would recommend linking to figure-of-eight knot directly.
Mathematicians should use [[figure-eight knot (mathematics)|figure-eight knot]] or [[figure eight knot (mathematics)|figure eight knot]]. --Chan-Ho (Talk) 22:42, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
