Related papers: Monotone homotopies and contracting discs on Riema…

This article investigates when homotopies can be converted to monotone homotopies without increasing the lengths of curves. A monotone homotopy is one which consists of curves which are simple or constant, and in which curves are pairwise…

We prove two theorems about homotopies of curves on 2-dimensional Riemannian manifolds. We show that, for any epsilon > 0, if two simple closed curves are homotopic through curves of bounded length L, then they are also isotopic through…

We answer a question of Liokumovich-Nabutovsky-Rotman showing that if D is a Riemannian 2-disc with boundary length L, diameter d and area A << d then D can be filled by a homotopy where the lengths of the intermediate curves are bounded by…

Suppose that $M$ is a $2$-dimensional oriented Riemannian manifold, and let $\gamma$ be a simple closed curve on $M$. Let $m \gamma$ denote the curve formed by tracing $\gamma$ $m$ times. We prove that if $m \gamma$ is contractible through…

In this paper, we are interested in short homologically and homotopically independent loops based at the same point on Riemannian surfaces and metric graphs. First, we show that for every closed Riemannian surface of genus $g \geq 2$ and…

In this paper, we study the problem of computing a homotopy from a planar curve $C$ to a point that minimizes the area swept. The existence of such a minimum homotopy is a direct result of the solution of Plateau's problem. Chambers and…

Given two Riemann surfaces with boundary and a homotopy class of topological embeddings between them, there is a conformal embedding in the homotopy class if and only if the extremal length of every simple multi-curve is decreased under the…

We study the interplay between the recently defined concept of minimum homotopy area and the classical topic of self-overlapping curves. The latter are plane curves which are the image of the boundary of an immersed disk. Our first…

We prove some rigidity theorems for configurations of closed disks. First, fix two collections $\mathcal{C}$ and $\tilde{\mathcal{C}}$ of closed disks in the Riemann sphere $\hat{\mathbb{C}}$, sharing a contact graph which…

We employ the curve shortening flow to establish three new results on the dynamics of geodesic flows of closed Riemannian surfaces. The first one is the stability, under $C^0$-small perturbations of the Riemannian metric, of certain flat…

We prove that if two conformal embeddings between Riemann surfaces with finite topology are homotopic, then they are isotopic through conformal embeddings. Furthermore, we show that the space of all conformal embeddings in a given homotopy…

A sequence of constant mean curvature surfaces $\Sigma_j$ with mean curvature $H_j \to \infty$ in a three-dimensional manifold $M$ condenses to a compact and connected graph $\Gamma$ consisting of a finite union of curves if $\Sigma_j$ is…

We consider stable minimal surfaces of genus 1 in Euclidean space and in Riemannian manifolds. Under the condition of covering stability (all finite covers are stable) we show that a genus 1 finite total curvature minimal surface in…

We survey several mathematical developments in the holonomy approach to gauge theory. A cornerstone of this approach is the introduction of group structures on spaces of based loops on a smooth manifold, relying on certain homotopy…

The paper contains an application of van Kampen theorem for groupoids for computation of homotopy types of certain class of non-compact foliated surfaces obtained by gluing at most countably many strips $\mathbb{R}\times(0,1)$ with boundary…

Given a Riemannian surface, we consider a naturally embedded graph which captures part of the topology and geometry of the surface. By studying this graph, we obtain results in three different directions. First, we find bounds on the…

We generalize and strengthen the theorem of Gromov that every compact Riemannian manifold of diameter at most D has a set of generators g_1,...,g_k of length at most 2D and relators of the form g_ig_m = g_j . In particular, we obtain an…

We prove that closed surfaces of all topological types, except for the non-orientable odd-genus ones, can be minimally embedded in the Riemannian product of a sphere and a circle of arbitrary radius. We illustrate it by obtaining some…

We prove the first polynomial bound on the number of monotonic homotopy moves required to tighten a collection of closed curves on any compact orientable surface, where the number of crossings in the curve is not allowed to increase at any…

One can describe isomorphism of two compact hyperbolic Riemann surfaces of the same genus by a measure-theoretic property: a chosen isomorphism of their fundamental groups corresponds to a homeomorphism on the boundary of the Poincar\'e…