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Alex Klotz

@aklotz.bsky.social

2.5K followers 2.1K following 820 posts

Physics professor at California State University, Long Beach. Interested in knots, DNA, and knotted DNA.

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Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · 1d

Magnetic field around a knotted wire

a blue knotted curve with little red arrows around it

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · 2d

A good physics day for guys named John.

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · 4d

The @canjphysics.bsky.social just followed me and this reminded me of the time about 10 years ago that my paper was rejected there because the referee thought I should acknowledge that he was on the path to win a Nobel prize in high school.

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · 5d

Three major problems that have been solved in my lifetime:
-ozone depletion
-acid rain
-USB plugs that are always upside down the first two times you try to plug them in

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Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · 7d

Have they considered a bus?

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Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · 12d

One of the few people demonstrably smarter than a 5th grader

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · 19d

Bro has never seen a droplet on a hydrophobic surface

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Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · 19d

New preprint with Ryan Blair and student Jonathan Strange, developing a new way to detect if ellipses form Borromean rings. It is 150 times faster than using the Jones polynomial!

arxiv.org/html/2509.15...

Title and abstract of the paper and some images of ellipses (Efficient Detection of Borromean Linking in Ellipses)

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Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · 23d

Also 3²/4²/45²

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · 26d

1. You're thinking of peanuts.
2. If a definition of a set excludes archetypal members of the set then it is a bad definition.

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · 27d

Reasonable. I also think the winter peak is usually bigger than summer.

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · 27d

COVID watchers, how high do we think this trend will get before the next zenith?

US COVID hospitalizations over the past year and a half.

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Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Sep 3

Sounds like your k_off is higher than your k_on.

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Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Sep 2

Imagine if it had scenes set in Mexico

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Aug 31

Does he know you can buy other types of bread

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Aug 27

(gamma-1) might be a better parameter

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Aug 27

What would this scatterplot look like? On the x axis is the mass of objects from electrons up to tanker ships. On the y axis is the fastest speed humans have managed to make it go.

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Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Aug 25

What if we kissed 👉👈 in the topological jellyfish

Knot diagram that looks like three jellyfishes touching

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Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Aug 25

My alma mater!

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Aug 24

We're seeing that now with home appliances

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Aug 13

a cartoon character with a glow in the dark skeleton behind bars says do you have any idea how little that narrows it

ALT: a cartoon character with a glow in the dark skeleton behind bars says do you have any idea how little that narrows it

media.tenor.com

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Aug 7

Case of a guy almost killing a guy

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Jul 29

New preprint for you knot weirdos

arxiv.org/abs/2507.20903

Geometric considerations for energy minimization of topological links and chainmail networks

Knot and link energies can be computed from sets of closed curves in three dimensional space, and each type of knot or link has a minimum energy associated with it. Here, we consider embeddings of lin...

arxiv.org

Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Jul 26

How many are we up to?

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Alex Klotz @aklotz.bsky.social · Jul 25

That whole thing would have been fine if they hadn't hyped it the way they did

"NASA will be having a press conference that will change the way we think about extraterrestrial life."

"Yeah we found a bacteria that's pretty arsenic tolerant."

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