A trivial knot whose spanning disks have exponential size

Abstract

If a closed curve in space is a trivial knot (intuitively, one can untie it without cutting) then it is the boundary of some disk with no self-intersections. In this paper we investigate the minimum number of faces of a polyhedral spanning disk of a polygonal knot with n segments. We exhibit a knot whose minimal spanning disk has exp(cn) faces, for some positive constant c.