4-Manifolds which embed in IR6 but not in IR5, and Seifert manifolds for fibered knots.
We create a framework for odd Khovanov homology in the spirit of Bar-Natan's construction for the ordinary Khovanov homology. Namely, we express the cube of resolutions of a link diagram as a diagram in a certain 2-category of chronological cobordisms and show that it is 2-commutative: the composition of 2-morphisms along any 3-dimensional subcube is trivial. This allows us to create a chain complex whose homotopy type modulo certain relations is a link invariant. Both the original and the odd Khovanov...
A n-knot group is the fundamental group of the complement of an n-sphere smoothly embedded in Sn+2. Artin gave in 1925 ([A]) an algebraic characterization of 1-knot groups. M. Kervaire gave in 1965 ([K]) an algebraic characterization of n-knot groups for n ≥ 3. The problem of characterizing algebraically 2-knot groups has been posed several times (see for example [Su, Problem 4.7]). Ribbon 2-knot groups have been characterized algebraically by Yajima [Y].We will give here a characterization of 2-knot...