## Just for fun: trefoil knot complement cake

Based on a joint work with Rob Clancy, presented at the Oxford Mathematical Cake Seminar. You might think that this is just a regular cake.

But it’s not! The icing is in the shape of a trefoil knot, so that the cake itself has the shape of a trefoil knot complement (in $S^3$). Here, take a look at the layers before they were put on top of each other:

-its fundamental groups is the braid group on 3 strands and has presentations $\langle x,y | xyx=yxy\rangle=\langle x,y | x^2=y^3\rangle$,
-it contains approximately 500 grams of butter, 500 grams of sugar and 7 eggs,
-it admits finite volume metrics with universal covers $\mathbb{H}^2\times \mathbb{R}$ and $\widetilde{SL_2(\mathbb{R})}$,
-the icing was very buttery,
-it has a Seifert fibration with base orbifold a once-punctured sphere with two cone-points,
-it took an afternoon minus a (spectacular!) rugby match to bake it.

Credits:

Designer: Rob
Manager: Rob
Cook: Rob
Sculptor: Rob
Icing artist: Rob
Dish washing: Alex

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### 1 Response to Just for fun: trefoil knot complement cake

1. yagoi says:

The tasteir post so far 🙂