KNOTS

Mathematicians - Jennifer Chayes, Mathematical Research Institute at Microsoft; Joan Birman, Columbia University; Vaughn Jones, University of California Berkeley; William Thurston, University of California Davis.

From the beauty and strength of woven knots to the dance of life - knots are everywhere, not just for our pleasure but as part of the intrinsic structure of nature, in the twisting of DNA strands and the braided forms of stringy matter.

Mathematicians tease out the different patterns of knots, and discover that these determine the possible shapes of three dimensional space.