A diagrammatic approach to link invariants of finite degree

Abstract

In [5] M. Polyak and O. Viro developed a graphical calculus of diagrammatic formulas for Vassiliev link invariants, and presented several explicit formulas for low degree invariants. M. Goussarov [2] proved that this arrow diagram calculus provides formulas for all Vassiliev knot invariants. The original note [5] contained no proofs, and it also contained some minor inaccuracies. This paper fills the gap in literature by presenting the material of [5] with all proofs and details, in a self-contained form. Furthermore, a compatible coalgebra structure, related to the connected sum of knots, is introduced on the algebra of based arrow diagrams with one circle.