The Quandary of Quandles: A Borel Complete Knot Invariant

We show that the isomorphism problems for left distributive algebras, racks, quandles and kei are as complex as possible in the sense of Borel reducibility. These algebraic structures are important for their connections with the theory of knots, links and braids. In particular, Joyce showed that a quandle can be associated with any knot, and this serves as a complete invariant for tame knots. However, such a classification of tame knots heuristically seemed to be unsatisfactory, due to the apparent difficulty of the quandle isomorphism problem. Our result confirms this view, showing that, from a set-theoretic perspective, classifying tame knots by quandles replaces one problem with (a special case of) a much harder problem.