| Affiliation: | Department of Mathematics, Ohio State University, Mansfield, Ohio 44906 ; Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4K1 |
| Abstract: | An  Casson invariant of a knot is an integer which can be thought of as an algebraic-topological count of the number of characters of  representations of the knot group which take a longitude into a given conjugacy class. For fibered knots, these invariants can be characterized as Lefschetz numbers which, for generic conjugacy classes, can be computed using a recursive algorithm of Atiyah and Bott, as adapted by Frohman. Using a new idea to solve the Atiyah-Bott recursion (as simplified by Zagier), we derive universal formulae which explicitly compute the invariants for all  . Our technique is based on our discovery that the generating functions associated to the relevant Lefschetz numbers (and polynomials) satisfy certain integral equations. |
