Harvey, Shelly L2019-05-172019-05-172019-052019-04-12May 2019Kuzbary, Miriam. "Link Concordance and Groups." (2019) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105956">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105956</a>.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105956This work concerns the study of link concordance using groups, both extracting concordance data from group theoretic invariants and determining the properties of group structures on links modulo concordance. Milnor's invariants are one of the more fundamental link concordance invariants; they are thought of as higher order linking numbers and can be computed using both Massey products (due to Turaev and Porter) and higher order intersections (due to Cochran). In this thesis, we generalize Milnor's invariants to knots inside a closed, oriented 3-manifold M. We call this the Dwyer number of a knot and show methods to compute it for null-homologous knots inside a family of 3-manifolds with free fundamental group. We further show the Dwyer number provides the weight of the first non-vanishing Massey product in the knot complement in the ambient manifold. Additionally, we prove the Dwyer number detects knots K in M bounding smoothly embedded disks in specific 4-manifolds with boundary M which are not concordant to the unknot. This result further motivates our definition of a new link concordance group using the knotification construction of Ozsvath and Szabo. Finally, we give a proof that the string link concordance group modulo its pure braid subgroup is non-abelian.application/pdfengCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.low dimensional topologygeometric topologylink concordanceknot concordancegroup theorynilpotent groupsMilnor's invariantsHeegaard Floer homologyThesis2019-05-17