Joe Boninger

An Alexander Polynomial Refinement for Alternating Links, with Trapezoidal Properties

We define an invariant of alternating links---a homogeneous, four-variable Laurent polynomial---that encodes the symmetrized Alexander polynomial, the signature, and other topological data. Along the way, we extend a spanning tree formulation of the Alexander polynomial due to Murasugi and Stoimenow from special altern...