Rick Litherland's Home Page

Here's a picture of a hyperboloid showing the double ruling, and here's another view. (They were taken in Corporation Street, Manchester (England).)

General information

Name:

Richard A. Litherland.

Position:

Professor.

PhD:

University of Cambridge, 1979. My supervisor was Cameron Gordon.

Research interests:

Low-dimensional topology, particularly knot theory. Here's a list of my papers.

Former PhD students, with dissertation titles:

Sam Nelson, Racks, quandles and virtual knots, 2002.

Bill Schellhorn, Virtual strings for closed curves with multiple components and filamentations for virtual links, 2005.

Steve Wallace, Surgery Description of Colored Knots, 2008.

Office Location and Phone:

378 Lockett Hall; (225) 578-1573.

Email Address:

lither@math.lsu.edu

Information for students

Spring 2008:

2057 (Multidimensional Calculus)

7550 (Differential Geometry)

It's all Greek to me:

Mathematicians use a lot of Greek letters, just as handy symbols, and it helps to know their names. If you say alpha and I say omega, we may not have to call the whole thing off, but we will have a failure to communicate. You can get the alphabet in DVI, PS or PDF format.

A puzzle

What's the next term in the following sequence?

1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, 312211, 13112221, …

Give up? (Even if you got it, or you've seen it before, you may find something new along with the answer.)

Non-mathematical stuff

A few things I am, or have been, interested in are:

• Interactive fiction
• Obfuscated C
• The Hoffman-Singleton graph (OK, this is mathematical, but there's nothing serious here.)

I now have another home page. There's not much interesting there yet.