Whitney towers and abelian invariants of knots
  We relate certain abelian invariants of a knot, namely the Alexander polynomial, the Blanchfield form, and the Arf invariant, to intersection data of a Whitney tower in the 4-ball bounded by the knot. We also give a new 3-dimensional algorithm for computing these invariants. 
Jae Choon Cha, Kent E. Orr, Mark Powell
math.GT