What have you been up to?
In math, knots have no ends, no separate threads. The ends connect like in a magic trick.
It took Lisa Piccirillo less than a week to answer a long-standing math problem about a strange knot. quantamagazine.org
This isn’t the same problem you and I have when our shoe laces get tangled.
The question asked whether the Conway knot is a slice of a higher-dimensional knot. “Sliceness” is one of the first natural questions knot theorists ask about knots in higher-dimensional spaces… The Conway knot had thumbed its nose at mathematicians for decades.
I’m not likely to understand the question, much less the solution, but for those of you with the math chops, there’s more explanation and diagrams in the article. You’ll find a beauty in the math that, alas, I’ll never share, but I still enjoy the tale.
Kate's Science - Real and Fantastic 