The Alexander polynomial is a knot invariant discovered in 1923 by J. W. Alexander (Alexander 1928). The Alexander polynomial remained the only known knot polynomial until the Jones polynomial was discovered in 1984. Unlike the Alexander polynomial, the more powerful Jones polynomial does, in most cases, distinguish handedness.
In technical language, the Alexander polynomial arises from the homology of the infinitely cyclic cover of a knot complement.
Any generator of a principal Alexander
ideal is called an Alexander polynomial (Rolfsen 1976). Because the Alexander
invariant of a tame knot in 
has a square presentation
matrix, its Alexander ideal is principal
and it has an Alexander polynomial denoted 
.
Let 
be the matrix product of braid
words of a knot, then
 |
(1)
|
where 
is the Alexander polynomial and det is the determinant.
The Alexander polynomial of a tame knot in 
satisfies
 |
(2)
|
where 
is a Seifert matrix, det is the determinant,
and 
denotes the transpose.
The Alexander polynomial is symmetric in 
and 
and satisfies
 |
(3)
|
where convention determines the sign. In this work, the convention 
is used. The quantity 
is known at the knot
determinant.
The notation 
is an abbreviation for the Alexander polynomial of
a knot
 |
(4)
|
The notation can also be extended for links, in which case one or more matrices is used to generate the corresponding multivariate Alexander polynomial (Rolfsen 1976, p. 389).
Let the Alexander polynomial of a link 
in the variable 
be denoted 
. Then there exists a skein
relationship discovered by J. H. Conway,
 |
(5)
|
corresponding to the above link diagrams (Adams 1994). This relation allows Alexander polynomials to be constructed for arbitrary knots by building them up as a sequence of over- and undercrossings.
The Alexander polynomial of a splittable link is always 0.
Surprisingly, there are known examples of nontrivial knots with Alexander polynomial 1, although no such examples occur among the knots of 10
or fewer crossings. An example is the 
-pretzel knot (Adams
1994, p. 167). Rolfsen (1976, p. 167) gives four other such examples.
A modified version of the Alexander polynomial was formulated by J. H. Conway. It is variously known as the Conway polynomial
(Livingston 1993, pp. 207-215) or Conway-Alexander polynomial, and is denoted
.
It is a reparametrization of the Alexander polynomial given by
 |
(6)
|
The skein relationship convention used by for the Conway polynomial is
 |
(7)
|
(Doll and Hoste 1991).
Examples of Alexander 
and Conway 
polynomials for common knots are
given in the following table
For a knot,
 |
(8)
|
where Arf is the Arf invariant (Jones 1985).
The HOMFLY polynomial 
generalizes the Alexander polynomial (as well at the
Jones polynomial) with
 |
(9)
|
(Doll and Hoste 1991).
Rolfsen (1976) gives a tabulation of Alexander polynomials 
(in abbreviated notation) for knots
up to 10 crossings and links up to 9 crossings. Livingston
(1993) gives an explicit table of Alexander polynomials (with negative powers cleared
and initial minus sign) for knots up to 9 crossings.
