New Ideas In Low Dimensional Topology

Book excerpt: This book consists of a selection of articles devoted to new ideas and developments in low dimensional topology. Low dimensions refer to dimensions three and four for the topology of manifolds and their submanifolds. Thus we have papers related to both manifolds and to knotted submanifolds of dimension one in three (classical knot theory) and two in four (surfaces in four dimensional spaces). Some of the work involves virtual knot theory where the knots are abstractions of classical knots but can be represented by knots embedded in surfaces. This leads both to new interactions with classical topology and to new interactions with essential combinatorics.