Professor Litherland plans to investigate algebraic invariants of knots of graphs in three-space. He has shown how to define an Alexander polynomial for a knot of a theta-curve, which may detect chirality, and intends to look both for extensions of this polynomial to other graphs and for analogues of the new link polynomials. In part this research is driven by the hope of applications to organic chemistry, where an attempt is being made to correlate properties of knotted molecules with their topological invariants.
