Abstract. Samuel J. Lomonaco Jr and Louis H. Kauffman conjectured that tame knot theory and knot mosaic theory are equivalent. We give a proof of the Lomonaco-Kauffman conjecture.

We show that the perturbative g invariant of rational homology 3-spheres can be recovered from the LMO invariant for any simple Lie algebra g, i.e., the LMO invariant is universal among the perturbative invariants. This universality was conjectured in [25]. Since the perturbative invariants dominate the quantum invariants of integral homology 3-spheres [13,14,15], this implies that the LMO invariant dominates the quantum invariants of integral homology 3-spheres.