arXiv research

The study counts curves on a once-punctured torus with self-intersections.

The study examines elastic curves with self-intersections and their properties.

Paper proves curves can be smoothed to reduce self-intersection by exactly 1.

We study mapping class group orbits of homotopy and isotopy classes of curves with self-intersections. We exhibit the asymptotics of the number of such orbits of curves with a bounded number of self-intersections, as the complexity of the surface tends to infinity. We also consider the minimal genus of a subsurface tha…

Study of Hamiltonian flows on character varieties for self-intersecting curves.

Suppose a smooth planar curve $γ$ is $2π$-periodic in the $x$ direction and the length of one period is $\ell$. It is shown that if $γ$ self-intersects, then it has a segment of length $\ell- 2π$ on which it self-intersects and somewhere its curvature is at least $2π/(\ell - 2π)$. The proof involves the projection $Γ$ …

The study of smoothing arcs and curves on surfaces, proving tautness and arc length spectrum properties.

Improved bounds on shortest geodesics with self-intersections on hyperbolic surfaces.

We give bounds on the number of non-simple closed curves on a negatively curved surface, given upper bounds on both length and self-intersection number. In particular, it was previously known that the number of all closed curves of length at most $L$ grows exponentially in $L$. We get exponentially tighter bounds given…

Oriented closed curves on an orientable surface with boundary are described up to continuous deformation by reduced cyclic words in the generators of the fundamental group and their inverses. By self-intersection number one means the minimum number of transversal self-intersection points of representatives of the class…

We address the problem of computing bounds for the self-intersection number (the minimum number of self-intersection points) of members of a free homotopy class of curves in the doubly-punctured plane as a function of their combinatorial length L; this is the number of letters required for a minimal description of the …

The minimum number of self-intersection points for members of a free homotopy class of curves on the punctured torus is bounded above in terms of the number L of letters required for a minimal description of the class in terms of the generators of the fundamental group and their inverses: it is less than or equal to (L…

Sharp lower bound on fold singularities self-intersections.

In an orientable surface with boundary, free homotopy classes of curves on surfaces are in one to one correspondence with cyclic reduced words in a set of standard generators of the fundamental group. The combinatorial length of a class is the number of letters of the corresponding word. The self-intersection of a free…

A filling curve $γ$ on a based surface $S$ determines a pseudo-Anosov homeomorphism $P(γ)$ of $S$ via the process of "point-pushing along $γ$." We consider the relationship between the self-intersection number $i(γ)$ of $γ$ and the dilatation of $P(γ)$; our main result is that the dilatation is bounded between $(i(γ)+1…

Study shows non-spectrality of certain curves and line segments.

The study proves a discrete version of Segre's theorem for polygonal curves.

The paper characterizes isomorphic covers of surfaces and applies it to distinguish representations.

New energy model avoids self-intersections in curve optimization.

We present a new explicit formula for the $m$-th Bernoulli number $B_m$, which involves two integer parameters $a$ and $n$ with $0\le a\le m\le n$. If we set $a=0$ and $n=m$, then the formula reduces to the celebrated Kronecker formula for $B_m$. We give two proofs of our formula. One is analytic and uses a certain fun…

We prove algebraic analogues of the facts that a curve on a surface with self-intersection number zero is homotopic to a cover of a simple curve, and that two simple curves on a surface with intersection number zero can be isotoped to be disjoint.

Regular homotopy classes of immersions of a 3-sphere in 5-space constitute an infinite cyclic group. The classes containing embeddings form a subgroup of index 24. The obstruction for a generic immersion to be regularly homotopic to an embedding is described in terms of geometric invariants of its self intersection. Ge…

The paper proves existence of minimal homotopies for immersed planar curves.

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 th…

The mapping class group of a surface $§$ acts on the set of closed geodesics on $§$. This action preserves self-intersection number. In this paper, we count the orbits of curves with at most $K$ self-intersections, for each $K \geq 1$. (The case when $K=0$ is already known.) We also restrict our count to those orbits t…

Let $γ$ be an essential closed curve with at most $k$ self-intersections on a surface $\mathcal{S}$ with negative Euler characteristic. In this paper, we construct a hyperbolic metric $ρ$ for which $γ$ has length at most $M \cdot \sqrt{k}$, where $M$ is a constant depending only on the topology of $\mathcal{S}$. Moreov…

We define and study a discrete process that generalizes the convex-layer decomposition of a planar point set. Our process, which we call "homotopic curve shortening" (HCS), starts with a closed curve (which might self-intersect) in the presence of a set $P\subset \mathbb R^2$ of point obstacles, and evolves in discrete…

A pair of distinct free homotopy classes of closed curves in an orientable surface $F$ with negative Euler characteristic is said to be length equivalent if for any hyperbolic structure on $F$, the length of the geodesic representative of one class is equal to the length of the geodesic representative of the other clas…

We investigate the duality between local (complex analytic) projective structures on surfaces and two dimensional (complex analytic) neighborhoods of rational curves having self-intersection +1. We study the analytic classification, existence of normal forms, pencil/fibration decomposition, infinitesimal symmetries. We…

We give a lower bound on the number of non-simple closed curves on a hyperbolic surface, given upper bounds on both length and self-intersection number. In particular, we carefully show how to construct closed geodesics on pairs of pants, and give a lower bound on the number of curves in this case. The lower bound for …

Let $S$ be a closed orientable hyperbolic surface, and let $\mathcal{O}(K,S)$ denote the number of mapping class group orbits of curves on $S$ with at most $K$ self-intersections. Building on work of Sapir [16], we give upper and lower bounds for $\mathcal{O}(K,S)$ which are both exponential in $\sqrt{K}$.

We give a solution of Plateau's problem for singular curves possibly having self-intersections. The proof is based on the solution of Plateau's problem for Jordan curves in very general metric spaces by Alexander Lytchak and Stefan Wenger and hence works also in a quite general setting. However the main result of this …

Properties of a parametric curve in R^3 are often determined by analysis of its piecewise linear (PL) approximation. For Bezier curves, there are standard algorithms, known as subdivision, that recursively create PL curves that converge to the curve in distance . The exterior angles of PL curves under subdivision are s…

In this paper a new intrinsic geometric characterization of the symmetric square of a curve and of the ordinary product of two curves is given. More precisely it is shown that the existence on a surface of general type S of irregularity q of an effective divisor D having self-intersection D^2>0 and arithmetic genus q i…

We consider the stable ruled surface $S_1$ over an elliptic curve. There is a unique foliation on $S_1$ transverse to the fibration. The minimal self-intersection sections also define a 2-web. We prove that the 4-web defined by the fibration, the foliation and the 2-web is locally parallelizable.

Suppose that $M$ is a $2$-dimensional oriented Riemannian manifold, and let $γ$ be a simple closed curve on $M$. Let $m γ$ denote the curve formed by tracing $γ$ $m$ times. We prove that if $m γ$ is contractible through curves of length less than $L$, then $γ$ is contractible through curves of length less than $L$. In …

We consider the relations between different measures of complexity for free homotopy classes of curves on a surface $Σ$, including the minimum number of self-intersections, the minimum length of the words representing them in a geometric presentation of $π_1(Σ)$, and the minimum degree of the coverings of $Σ$ to which …

A virtual string is a scheme of self-intersections of a closed curve on a surface. We introduce virtual strings and study their geometric properties and homotopy invariants. We also discuss connections between virtual strings, Gauss words, and virtual knots.

We consider the problem of minimizing the bending or elastic energy among Jordan curves confined in a given open set $Ω$. We prove existence, regularity and some structural properties of minimizers. In particular, when $Ω$ is convex we show that a minimizer is necessarily a convex curve. We also provide an example of a…

We propose a weak formulation for the binormal curvature flow of curves in $\R^3.$ This formulation is sufficiently broad to consider integral currents as initial data, and sufficiently strong for the weak-strong uniqueness property to hold, as long as self-intersections do not occur. We also prove a global existence t…

Random curves on surfaces have predictable properties as they grow.

In the mid eighties Goldman proved an embedded curve could be isotoped to not intersect a closed geodesic if and only if their Lie bracket (as defined in that work) vanished. Goldman asked for a topological proof and about extensions of the conclusion to curves with self-intersection. Turaev, in the late eighties, aske…

We construct an invariant of parametrized generic real algebraic surfaces in RP^3 which generalizes the Brown invariant of immersed surfaces from smooth topology. The invariant is constructed using the self intersection, which is a real algebraic curve with points of three local characters: the intersection of two real…

Study finds negatively curved spheres in elliptic surfaces and their modifications.

We give various estimates of the minimal number of self-intersections of a nontrivial element of the kth term of the lower central series and derived series of the fundamental group of a surface. As an application, we obtain a new topological proof of the fact that free groups and fundamental groups of closed surfaces …

In the presence of certain topological conditions, we provide lower bounds for the infimum of the length function associated to a collection of curves on Teichmüller space that depend on the dual cube complex associated to the collection, a concept due to Sageev. As an application of our bounds, we obtain estimates for…

Using intersection and self-intersection of loops, Turaev introduced in the seventies two fundamental operations on the algebra $\mathbb{Q}[π]$ of the fundamental group $π$ of a surface with boundary. The first operation is binary and measures the intersection of two oriented based curves on the surface, while the seco…

We show that if a compact complex surface admits a locally conformally flat metric, then it cannot contain a smooth rational curve of odd self-intersection. In particular, the surface has to be minimal. Then we give a list of possibilities of such surfaces.