Triangulations of the 3-sphere with knotted edge
Dionne Ibarra, Daniel V. Mathews, Jessica S. Purcell, Jonathan Spreer · Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A · 2026
We prove that for any knot K , there exists a decomposition of the 3-sphere into tetrahedra such that a representative of K is formed from one vertex and one edge of the decomposition. The proof is constructive, and based on fully augmented links. We use our method to produce a family of simplicial triangulations of the 3-sphere with a loop of four edges representing a t -fold connected sum of the trefoil, whose number of tetrahedra grows linearly in t . This is best possible up to a constant factor.