Not quite, since most topological transformations can’t be done on actual physical objects. (I would love to see some of those wood and string puzzles try to im

Not quite, since most topological transformations can’t be done on actual physical objects. (I would love to see some of those wood and string puzzles try to implement some of these style of topological puzzles though, that would be awesome if it was possible.) Most of the wood and string puzzles fall under knot theory specifically, rather than topology. The main trick I’ve seen used in those puzzles is they have knots with an even number of crossings and therefore they can be separated (I believe the formal term might be “they have ambient isotopy to unlinked unknots”, but there’s a lot of subtlety I don’t get, so that’s probably wrong) but the knots are deformed to look like two distinct knots, each with an odd number of crossings (a knot with an odd number of crossings cannot be separated). Our intuition tells us “one inseparable knot plus another inseparable knot equals a single, bigger, still inseparable knot”, but that’s knot the case.