5 research outputs found
Self-intersection numbers of length-equivalent curves on surfaces
Two free homotopy classes of closed curves in an orientable surface with
negative Euler characteristic are said to be length equivalent if for any
hyperbolic structure on the surface, the length of the geodesic in one class is
equal to the length of the geodesic in the other class. We show that there are
elements in the free group of two generators that are length equivalent and
have different self-intersection numbers as elements in the fundamental group
of the punctured torus and as elements in the pair of pants. This result
answers open questions about length equivalence classes and raises new ones
Smoothing curves carefully
This paper proves an elementary and topological fact about closed curves on
surfaces, namely that by carefully smoothing an intersection point, one can
reduce self-intersection by exactly . This immediately implies a positive
answer to a problem first raised by Basmajian in 1993: among all closed
geodesics of a hyperbolic surface that self-intersect at least times, does
the shortest one self-intersect exactly times? The answer is also shown to
be positive for arbitrary Riemannian metrics.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure
Computing the Geometric Intersection Number of Curves
The geometric intersection number of a curve on a surface is the minimal number of self-intersections of any homotopic curve, i.e. of any curve obtained by continuous deformation. Given a curve c represented by a closed walk of length at most l on a combinatorial surface of complexity n we describe simple algorithms to (1) compute the geometric intersection number of c in O(n+ l^2) time, (2) construct a curve homotopic to c that realizes this geometric intersection number in O(n+l^4) time, (3) decide if the geometric intersection number of c is zero, i.e. if c is homotopic to a simple curve, in O(n+l log^2 l) time.
To our knowledge, no exact complexity analysis had yet appeared on those problems. An optimistic analysis of the complexity of the published algorithms for problems (1) and (3) gives at best a O(n+g^2l^2) time complexity on a genus g surface without boundary. No polynomial time algorithm was known for problem (2). Interestingly, our solution to problem (3) is the first quasi-linear algorithm since the problem was raised by Poincare more than a century ago. Finally, we note that our algorithm for problem (1) extends to computing the geometric intersection number of two curves of length at most l in O(n+ l^2) time