Related papers: The complexity of the normal surface solution spac…
We give a simple sufficient condition for a spun-normal surface in an ideal triangulation to be incompressible, namely that it is a vertex surface with non-empty boundary which has a quadrilateral in each tetrahedron. While this condition…
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 show that there are a finite number of possible pictures for a surface in a tetrahedron with local index $n$. Combined with previous results, this establishes that any topologically minimal surface can be transformed into one with a…
In this paper we compute upper bounds for the number of ordinary triple points on a hypersurface in $P^3$ and give a complete classification for degree six (degree four or less is trivial, and five is elementary). But the real purpose is to…
Computational topology is an area that revisits topological problems from an algorithmic point of view, and develops topological tools for improved algorithms. We survey results in computational topology that are concerned with graphs drawn…
In this paper we provide, first, a general symbolic algorithm for computing the symmetries of a given rational surface, based on the classical differential invariants of surfaces, i.e. Gauss curvature and mean curvature. In practice, the…
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,…
We consider rather a general class of multi-level optimization problems, where a convex objective function is to be minimized subject to constraints of optimality of nested convex optimization problems. As a special case, we consider a…
It is shown that given any link-manifold, there is an algorithm to decide if the manifold contains an embedded, essential planar surface; if it does, the algorithm will construct one. If a slope on the boundary of the link-manifold is…
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…
A fast algorithm for counting intersections of two normal curves on a triangulated surface is proposed. It yields a convenient way for treating mapping class groups of punctured surfaces by presenting mapping classes by matrices, and the…
There are many fundamental algorithmic problems on triangulated 3-manifolds whose complexities are unknown. Here we study the problem of finding a taut angle structure on a 3-manifold triangulation, whose existence has implications for both…
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…
Triangle meshes remain the most popular data representation for surface geometry. This ubiquitous representation is essentially a hybrid one that decouples continuous vertex locations from the discrete topological triangulation.…
Many computer vision challenges require continuous outputs, but tend to be solved by discrete classification. The reason is classification's natural containment within a probability $n$-simplex, as defined by the popular softmax activation…
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)…
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…
Tightness is a generalisation of the notion of convexity: a space is tight if and only if it is "as convex as possible", given its topological constraints. For a simplicial complex, deciding tightness has a straightforward exponential time…
Normal and almost normal surfaces are essential tools for algorithmic 3-manifold topology, but to use them requires exponentially slow enumeration algorithms in a high-dimensional vector space. The quadrilateral coordinates of Tollefson…
We propose a hybrid image-space/object-space solution to the classical hidden surface removal problem: Given n disjoint triangles in Real^3 and p sample points (``pixels'') in the xy-plane, determine the first triangle directly behind each…