English

The Wecken property for random maps on surfaces with boundary

Algebraic Topology 2011-09-02 v1 General Topology

Abstract

A selfmap is Wecken when the minimal number of fixed points among all maps in its homotopy class is equal to the Nielsen number, a homotopy invariant lower bound on the number of fixed points. All selfmaps are Wecken for manifolds of dimension not equal to 2, but some non-Wecken maps exist on surfaces. We attempt to measure how common the Wecken property is on surfaces with boundary by estimating the proportion of maps which are Wecken, measured by asymptotic density. Intuitively, this is the probability that a randomly chosen homotopy class of maps consists of Wecken maps. We show that this density is nonzero for surfaces with boundary. When the fundamental group of our space is free of rank n, we give nonzero lower bounds for the density of Wecken maps in terms of n, and compute the (nonzero) limit of these bounds as n goes to infinity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1109.0218,
  title  = {The Wecken property for random maps on surfaces with boundary},
  author = {Jacqueline Brimley and Matthew Griisser and Allison Miller and P. Christopher Staecker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.0218},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

20 pages, 1 stunning figure

R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:58:26.627Z