475 research outputs found
The Number of Triangles Needed to Span a Polygon Embedded in R^d
Given a closed polygon P having n edges, embedded in R^d, we give upper and
lower bounds for the minimal number of triangles t needed to form a
triangulated PL surface in R^d having P as its geometric boundary. The most
interesting case is dimension 3, where the polygon may be knotted. We use the
Seifert suface construction to show there always exists an embedded surface
requiring at most 7n^2 triangles. We complement this result by showing there
are polygons in R^3 for which any embedded surface requires at least 1/2n^2 -
O(n) triangles. In dimension 2 only n-2 triangles are needed, and in dimensions
5 or more there exists an embedded surface requiring at most n triangles. In
dimension 4 we obtain a partial answer, with an O(n^2) upper bound for embedded
surfaces, and a construction of an immersed disk requiring at most 3n
triangles. These results can be interpreted as giving qualitiative discrete
analogues of the isoperimetric inequality for piecewise linear manifolds.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures. This paper is a retitled, revised version of
math.GT/020217
Chromatic Numbers of Simplicial Manifolds
Higher chromatic numbers of simplicial complexes naturally
generalize the chromatic number of a graph. In any fixed dimension
, the -chromatic number of -complexes can become arbitrarily
large for [6,18]. In contrast, , and only
little is known on for .
A particular class of -complexes are triangulations of -manifolds. As a
consequence of the Map Color Theorem for surfaces [29], the 2-chromatic number
of any fixed surface is finite. However, by combining results from the
literature, we will see that for surfaces becomes arbitrarily large
with growing genus. The proof for this is via Steiner triple systems and is
non-constructive. In particular, up to now, no explicit triangulations of
surfaces with high were known.
We show that orientable surfaces of genus at least 20 and non-orientable
surfaces of genus at least 26 have a 2-chromatic number of at least 4. Via a
projective Steiner triple systems, we construct an explicit triangulation of a
non-orientable surface of genus 2542 and with face vector
that has 2-chromatic number 5 or 6. We also give orientable examples with
2-chromatic numbers 5 and 6.
For 3-dimensional manifolds, an iterated moment curve construction [18] along
with embedding results [6] can be used to produce triangulations with
arbitrarily large 2-chromatic number, but of tremendous size. Via a topological
version of the geometric construction of [18], we obtain a rather small
triangulation of the 3-dimensional sphere with face vector
and 2-chromatic number 5.Comment: 22 pages, 11 figures, revised presentatio
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