Rudi Penne
The Alexander Polynomial of a Configuration of Skew Lines in 3-Space

In Penne, 1995, we observed that the multi-variable Alexander polynomial can be computed by means of "multi-variable Burau matrices", the entries of which can be visualized by a "path model". In this article we introduce the Alexander polynomial for line configurations. The correspondence between "adjacency of lines" in a configuration, and the factorization of its Alexander polynomial can be well understood by way of the path model.