Classifying 2-string tangles within families and tangle tabulation

A knot can be thought of as a knotted piece of string with the ends glued together. A tangle is formed by intersecting a knot with a 3-dimensional ball. The portion of the knot in the interior of the ball along with the fixed intersection points on the surface of the ball form the tangle. Tangles can be used to model protein- DNA binding, so another way to think of a tangle is in terms of segments of DNA (the strings) bounded by the protein complex (the 3-dimensional ball). In this thesis, we look at an algorithm used to list tangles. We also classify tangles into families.