Related papers: Quadrilateral-octagon coordinates for almost norma…

The enumeration of normal surfaces is a crucial but very slow operation in algorithmic 3-manifold topology. At the heart of this operation is a polytope vertex enumeration in a high-dimensional space (standard coordinates). Tollefson's…

We interpret a normal surface in a (singular) three-manifold in terms of the homology of a chain complex. This allows us to study the relation between normal surfaces and their quadrilateral co-ordinates. Specifically, we give a proof of an…

The Heegaard genus is a fundamental invariant of 3-manifolds. However, computing the Heegaard genus of a triangulated 3-manifold is NP-hard, and while algorithms exist, little work has been done in making such an algorithm efficient and…

A major breakthrough in the theory of topological algorithms occurred in 1992 when Hyam Rubinstein introduced the idea of an almost normal surface. We explain how almost normal surfaces emerged naturally from the study of geodesics and…

Normal surface theory is a central tool in algorithmic three-dimensional topology, and the enumeration of vertex normal surfaces is the computational bottleneck in many important algorithms. However, it is not well understood how the number…

We consider the natural problem of counting isotopy classes of essential surfaces in 3-manifolds, focusing on closed essential surfaces in a broad class of hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Our main result is that the count of (possibly disconnected)…

This paper gives sharp linear bounds on the genus of a normal surface in a triangulated compact, orientable 3--manifold in terms of the quadrilaterals in its cell decomposition---different bounds arise from varying hypotheses on the surface…

This} paper presents relations between least area and normal surfaces, embedded in either a Euclidean or hyperbolic $3$-manifold. A relaxed version of normal surfaces, termed quasi-normal, is introduced, and it is shown that under…

Normal surface theory, a tool to represent surfaces in a triangulated 3-manifold combinatorially, is ubiquitous in computational 3-manifold theory. In this paper, we investigate a relaxed notion of normal surfaces where we remove the…

The concept of a normal surface in a triangulated, compact 3-manifold was generalised by Thurston to a spun-normal surface in a non-compact 3-manifold with ideal triangulation. This paper defines a boundary curve map which takes a…

In this paper the problem of finding a normal form of triangles and plane quadrilaterals up to similarity is considered. Several normal forms for triangles and a normal form for quadrilaterals of special case are described. Normal forms of…

For many fundamental problems in computational topology, such as unknot recognition and $3$-sphere recognition, the existence of a polynomial-time solution remains unknown. A major algorithmic tool behind some of the best known algorithms…

Let $M$ be a compact 3-manifold with a triangulation $\tau$. We give an inequality relating the Euler characteristic of a surface $F$ normally embedded in $M$ with the number of normal quadrilaterals in $F$. This gives a relation between a…

This paper introduces even triangulations of n-dimensional pseudo-manifolds and links their combinatorics to the topology of the pseudo-manifolds. This is done via normal hypersurface theory and the study of certain symmetric…

Given a triangulation of a closed, oriented, irreducible, atoroidal 3-manifold every oriented, incompressible surface may be isotoped into normal position relative to the triangulation. Such a normal oriented surface is then encoded by…

We investigate slicings of combinatorial manifolds as properly embedded co-dimension 1 submanifolds. A focus is given to dimension 3 where slicings are normal surfaces. In the case of 2-neighborly 3-manifolds and quadrangulated slicings, a…

How good is a triangulation as an approximation of a smooth curved surface or manifold? We provide bounds on the {\em interpolation error}, the error in the position of the surface, and the {\em normal error}, the error in the normal…

Tollefson described a variant of normal surface theory for 3-manifolds, called Q-theory, where only the quadrilateral coordinates are used. Suppose $M$ is a triangulated, compact, irreducible, boundary-irreducible 3-manifold. In Q-theory,…

A new lower bound on the complexity of a 3-manifold is given using the Z2-Thurston norm. This bound is shown to be sharp, and the minimal triangulations realising it are characterised using normal surfaces consisting entirely of…

We define a 2-normal surface to be one which intersects every 3-simplex of a triangulated 3-manifold in normal triangles and quadrilaterals, with one or two exceptions. The possible exceptions are a pair of octagons, a pair of unknotted…