Abstract:
A Dehn surgery slope p/q is said to be characterizing for a knot K if the homeomorphism type of the p/q-Dehn surgery along K determines the knot up to isotopy. I discuss advances towards a conjecture of McCoy that states that for any knot, all but at most finitely many non-integral slopes are characterizing. By combining ideas from geometric topology and computations of knot Floer complexes, we identify a bounded region containing all non-characterizing non-integral Dehn surgery slopes for the vast majority of knots with at most 16 crossings.