Knot

So this morning I found myself invigilating the first exams of the year for the students of the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. There is nothing more mentally and physically demanding than invigilating undergraduate exams. Nothing! Not even sitting the paper itself (in this case a natural language processing paper) could be such a calorie burner. It's so tedious and boring! Just sitting there for 2-hours watching examinees in order to ensure that they aren't cheating or causing anarchy or some such. I wouldn't wish exam invigilation upon my worst enemy! Urgh!

Anyhow, one of the rules of the exam procedure is that if an examinee uses any supplemental answer books to answer their papers, then they have to tie them to the back of their main answer book using a piece of standard issue examination compliant string.

I got pretty bored during this morning's 2-hour extravaganza and foundmyself considering this rule. Like suppose you lived in a culture which had no concept of knots. A culture that had no idea that the ends of a piece of string could be tied together using this thing called a "knot". What would that culture be like?

If you came from such a culture, would you automatically be disadvantaged by the exam rules of Imperial College London? Would pastimes such as the Boy Scouts or sailing be entirely different without knots? What would the subfield of mathematical topology, known as knot theory, be like? Would it even exist? How long would a piece of string be to such "knotless" societies?

All this pondering about knots made me realise how important they are to our culture. Like I said: I wouldn't wish exam invigilation upon my worst enemy. Unless of course, I would. ;)