Regular Seifert surfaces and Vassiliev knot invariants
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We show that the Vassiliev invariants of orders $\leq n$ of a knot K, are obstructions to finding a regular Seifert surface, S, whose complement looks "simple" (e.g. like the complement of a disc) to the lower central series of its fundamental group. As a consequence of this, we obtain that the Vassiliev invariants of the knot $K=\partial S$ are null-concordance obstructions of certain links that can be obtained from regular spines of S. We also discuss various generalizations of these results, and we conjecture a geometric characterization of knots whose invariants of all orders vanish.
54 pages. Exposition extensively revised
54 pages. Exposition extensively revised