Conferees tie one on

A topic: simplifying a classic knot By David Arnold, Globe Staff, 08/03/97

There are prettier knots. Ashley's bend lacks the pleasing curves of the sheet bend or the organized folds in the carrick bend. But for sailors, nothing joins two ropes more securely than Ashley's bend, although ``the method of tying is more complicated than could be wished,'' Clifford Ashley wrote in The Ashley Book of Knots shortly before his death in 1947.

It took half a century, but one Rob Wolfe of Chicago thinks he has found a simpler solution. Now, there are many folks who believe a faster route to Ashley's bend is not Page One news. But not, it would seem, the members of the International Guild of Knot Tyers. About 80 of them will meet Thursday at the New Bedford Whaling Museum to mark the 50th anniversary of Ashley's death, scrutinize Wolfe's new, improved knot, and marvel at a potpourri of other advancements that have come of late to the intense, if esoteric, world of knotting matters.

Few other fields of interest better marry (tie the ... between) a millennia-old survival skill and a burgeoning branch of advanced mathematics and computer science. ``The aim of mathematical knot theory is to classify what in the natural world often looks like a tangled mess, be it the DNA molecule or the braided rings around Saturn,'' said Gregory Buck, chairman of the mathematics department at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H.

The old salts and math wonks will mingle, as they have annually since the North American branch of the knot tyers' guild was formed in 1994, to discuss and dissect a technology that incorporates craft, mathematics, and science. The convention ends Saturday, with public demonstrations from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Conferees include James Doyle of Salem, who recently spent 70 hours weaving a bell pull for the USS Constitution. At another end of the spectrum is Vaughan Jones, professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, who won the Fields Medal for his work on Van Neuman algebra, geometric topology, and a ``new polynomial invariant for knots and links in three-dimensional space.''

Pretty much everyone will share the centuries-old language of knots, where things like chinkles, gokes, plats, and swifters get frapped, swagged, triced, and raddled. They will also share a respect bordering on awe for Clifford W. Ashley, who left behind a 600-page tome with 7,000 drawings depicting more than 3,900 knots. Ashley's bend, incidentally, is No. 1452. Admirers of the man hope to persuade the US Postal Service to issue a commemorative stamp that includes a portrait of the author/painter and a simplified drawing of the bend for postal patrons who might
be at loose ends.

``It would be the first stamp ever issued with a utilitarian reward,'' said Richard Blackmer, a Long Island-based windsurfer who is managing the stamp project.

The Ashley Book of Knots has never gone out of print, and is now sold in five languages. The public became familiar with Ashley's knot descriptions when author E. Annie Proulx used them to introduce chapters in ``The Shipping News,'' which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994.

Knot aficionados say that for them, the book has long been part-bible and part-encyclopedia, but always a work of art. ``It is the pivotal piece of work for knots, which are the underpinnings of our civilization,'' said Des Pawson, the British president of the International Guild of Knot Tyers. He points out that 6,000-year-old remnants of fishing nets have been found with a weaving knot still used today.

Pawson cofounded the organization, now 800 members strong, in 1982 after a British physician named Edward Hunter made news locally for inventing the Hunter's bend. (Bends join lines together; hitches attach lines to objects.)

Alas, the American mountaineer Phil Smith informed the doctor, after the story crossed the ocean, that Hunter had merely reinvented a form of the rigger's bend. Hunter apparently took thenews graciously, supporting Pawson's desire to form an international guild so, as Pawson put it,``We don't continually find ourselves becoming undone.''

Precision is one of the allures of knotting, practitioners say.
``A knot is never `nearly right'; it is either exactly right or it is hopelessly wrong,'' Ashley wrote toward the end of his life from his home in Westport, where one of his daughters (a speaker this week) still lives. Ashley continued: ``In a knot of eight crossings, which is about the average-size knot, there are 256 over-and-under arrangements possible. ... Make only one change ... and either an entirely different knot is made or no knot at all may result.''

It was a fact that Buck of St. Anselm College was eager to point out the other day at a dining room table cluttered with knotted rope. One line was cinched into a chain stitch several feet long. With one change in the first stitch, the chain unzipped like the top of a bag of charcoal.

Buck has participated in the development of computer programs that can take a large knot - the hopelessly tangled garden hose variety, for example - and undo it. Mathematics played an integral role several years ago in proving that the DNA molecule - a huge, tangled loop - could not split in two and replicate without an enzyme cutting, then mending, the knot.

Wolfe of Chicago (``the knotty professor,'' says his wife) is not sure where - or why - the path began toward an easier Ashley's bend, except that Ashley himself wrote that the knot's cumbersome construction ``can probably be remedied.''
His simple solution belies the two years of dabbling it took to develop. The dextrous reader should be able to master it in two minutes. Then again, no one ever claimed the path to Einstein's E=MC was a cinch.

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