Related papers: Bounds for the genus of a normal surface

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 describe some theoretical results on triangulations of surfaces and we develop a theory on roots, decompositions and genus-surfaces. We apply this theory to describe an algorithm to list all triangulations of closed surfaces with at most…

Following Matveev, a k-normal surface in a triangulated 3-manifold is a generalization of both normal and (octagonal) almost normal surfaces. Using spines, complexity, and Turaev-Viro invariants of 3-manifolds, we prove the following…

In this paper, we will compute the dimension of the space of spun and ordinary normal surfaces in an ideal triangulation of the interior of a compact 3-manifold with incompressible tori or Klein bottle components. Spun normal surfaces have…

In this thesis, we use normal surface theory to understand certain properties of minimal triangulations of compact orientable 3-manifolds. We describe the collapsing process of normal 2-spheres and disks. Using some geometrical…

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…

In three-dimensional computational topology, the theory of normal surfaces is a tool of great theoretical and practical significance. Although this theory typically leads to exponential time algorithms, very little is known about how these…

In this paper we prove genus bounds for closed embedded minimal surfaces in a closed 3-dimensional manifold constructed via min-max arguments. A stronger estimate was announced by Pitts and Rubistein but to our knowledge its proof has never…

Let M be the interior of a compact 3-manifold with non-empty boundary, and T be an ideal (topological) triangulation of M. This paper describes necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of angle structures, semi-angle structures…

We show that a strongly irreducible and boundary-strongly irreducible surface can be isotoped to be almost normal in a triangulated 3-manifold.

Triangulated surfaces are compact Riemann surfaces equipped with a conformal triangulation by equilateral triangles. In 2004, Brooks and Makover asked how triangulated surfaces are distributed in the moduli space of Riemann surfaces as the…

In this paper, we use normal surface theory to study Dehn filling on a knot-manifold. First, it is shown that there is a finite computable set of slopes on the boundary of a knot-manifold that bound normal and almost normal surfaces in a…

We introduce a new technique, based on Gaussian maps, to study the possibility, for a given surface, to lie on a threefold as a very ample divisor with given normal bundle. We give several applications, among which one to surfaces of…

On a finite-volume hyperbolic $3$-manifold, we establish an upper bound on the area of closed embedded surfaces with constant mean curvature at least one, depending on the mean curvature and the genus bounds. This area bound implies…