How did mathematicians become interested in knot theory?
My understanding is that the mathematical origins came roughly with the studies of Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) involving electromagnetism and what would happen when an electric current is flowing through a wire. That would depend upon the configuration of the wire in space. That led later to the work in England of Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait at the end of the nineteenth century. They were really the first to set about classifying configurations of knots, in part because they believed that atoms might be knots in the ether. Why did anybody think knot theory had application to atoms? At the end of the nineteenth century, scientists realized the world of knots was a discrete world, that is, different knot types could be distinguished from one another. This raised the question of whether knots were a good model for atoms, which seemed to have a similar character—there are hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms and carbon atoms and so on, each with its own characteristics. In fact, the
