On the Combinatorial Structure of Primitive Vassiliev Invariants, III - A Lower Bound

We prove that the dimension of the space of primitive Vassiliev invariants of degree n grows - as n tends to infinity - faster than Exp(c Sqrt(n)) for any c < Pi Sqrt (2/3). The proof relies on the use of the weight systems coming from the Lie algebra gl(N). In fact, we show that our bound is - up to multiplication with a rational function in n - the best possible that one can get with gl(N)-weight systems.