Carlo Collari
NYU Abu Dhabi

The weak splitting number is the minimal number of crossing
changes which are necessary to split the a link into a collection of
disjoint knots. This invariant can be thought of as the (Gordian) distance
between a link and the set of completely split links, and somehow as a
measure of the complexity of a link. There is another version of the
splitting number whose definition allows only crossing changes between
different components.

In this talk we shall illustrate various methods to compute the weak
splitting number and the splitting number. In particular, I shall give
a template to produce lower bounds on the weak splitting number, and
provide some examples. The material discussed in this talk is joint
work with A. Cavallo and A. Conway.