Abstract: | There is a positive constant such that for any diagram representing the unknot, there is a sequence of at most Reidemeister moves that will convert it to a trivial knot diagram, where is the number of crossings in . A similar result holds for elementary moves on a polygonal knot embedded in the 1-skeleton of the interior of a compact, orientable, triangulated 3-manifold . There is a positive constant such that for each , if consists of tetrahedra and is unknotted, then there is a sequence of at most elementary moves in which transforms to a triangle contained inside one tetrahedron of . We obtain explicit values for and . |