TOPOLOGY SEMINAR

11/8/2007

Dan Silver
South Alabama

When knots don't fiber

In this joint work with Susan Williams we consider the conjecture: a knot is nonfibered if and only if its infinite cyclic cover has uncountably many finite covers. We prove it for a class of knots that includes all knots of genus 1. We also discuss two equivalent forms of the conjecture, one involving twisted Alexander polynomials, the other a weak form of subgroup separability.