On Sat, 15 Jun 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
I would have my doubts about how interesting the direction could get, since knot theory is a dead area. The classification problem was fully solved, and after that things got boring...
Well... I think the theory has become much more interesting after the classification, because we know that our problem _can_ be solved, and our only problem is to do it faster and to get a better understanding for the subject (there are lots of conjectures which seems simple, but whose state is unknown.) I agree that it doesn't look good (since most of our invariants are NP-hard) but the vassiliev invariants might be used to approximate the other invariants... (I do not know what has been done in such approximation theory the last couple of years.) /Krister