Related papers: Combinatorial Properties of Self-Overlapping Curve…

Let $\gamma$ be a generic closed curve in the plane. Samuel Blank, in his 1967 Ph.D. thesis, determined if $\gamma$ is self-overlapping by geometrically constructing a combinatorial word from $\gamma$. More recently, Zipei Nie, in an…

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…

We study the existence of area-minimizing homotopies between homotopic curves in the plane. While the classical Plateau problem establishes the existence of least-area surfaces spanning a single Jordan curve, the corresponding existence…

A surface embedded in space, in such a way that each point has a neighborhood within which the surface is a terrain, projects to an immersed surface in the plane, the boundary of which is a self-intersecting curve. Under what circumstances…

We study mapping class group orbits of homotopy and isotopy classes of curves with self-intersections. We exhibit the asymptotics of the number of such orbits of curves with a bounded number of self-intersections, as the complexity of the…

We prove a "gluing" theorem for monotone homotopies; a monotone homotopy is a homotopy through simple contractible closed curves which themselves are pairwise disjoint. We show that two monotone homotopies which have appropriate overlap can…

We consider unbounded curves without endpoints. Isomorphism is equivalence up to translation. Self-avoiding plane-filling curves cannot be periodic, but they can satisfy the local isomorphism property: We obtain a set $\Omega $ of coverings…

We prove a compactness result for holomorphic curves with boundary on an immersed Lagrangian submanifold with clean self-intersection. As a consequence, we show that the number of intersections of such holomorphic curves with the…

Given a smooth manifold $M$ and a totally nonholonomic distribution $\Delta\subset TM$ of rank $d$, we study the effect of singular curves on the topology of the space of horizontal paths joining two points on $M$. Singular curves are…

We provide an efficient algorithm to compute the minimum area of a homotopy between two closed plane curves, given that they divide the plane into finite number of regions. For any positive real number $\varepsilon>0$, we construct a closed…

We give two proofs that appropriately defined congruence subgroups of the mapping class group of a surface with punctures/boundary have enormous amounts of rational cohomology in their virtual cohomological dimension. In particular we give…

This treatise concerns shapes in the sense of constellations of points with various automorphisms quotiented out: continuous translations, rotations and dilations, and also discrete mirror image identification and labelling…

Any generic closed curve in the plane can be transformed into a simple closed curve by a finite sequence of local transformations called homotopy moves. We prove that simplifying a planar closed curve with $n$ self-crossings requires…

We study the intersection theory of punctured pseudoholomorphic curves in $4$-dimensional symplectic cobordisms. We first study the local intersection properties of such curves at the punctures. We then use this to develop topological…

Let $ S $ be a hyperbolic surface. We investigate the topology of the space of all curves on $ S $ which start and end at given points in given directions, and whose curvatures are constrained to lie in a given interval $…

Let $\gamma$ be a filling curve on a topological surface $\Sigma$ of genus $g \geq 2$. The inf invariant of $\gamma$, denoted $m_{\gamma}$, is the infimum of the length function on the space of marked hyperbolic structures on $\Sigma$. This…

In an orientable surface with boundary, free homotopy classes of curves on surfaces are in one to one correspondence with cyclic reduced words in a set of standard generators of the fundamental group. The combinatorial length of a class is…

A self-avoiding plane-filling curve cannot be periodic, but we show that it can satisfy the local isomorphism property. We investigate three families of coverings of the plane by finite sets of nonoverlapping self-avoiding curves which…

Consider a sequence of minimal varieties M_i in a Riemannian manifold N such that the boundary measures are uniformly bounded on compact sets. Let Z be the set of points at which the areas of the M_i blow up. We prove that Z behaves in some…

Let $\Gamma$ be an arrangement of Jordan curves in the plane, i.e., simple closed curves in the plane. For any curve $\gamma \in \Gamma$, we denote the bounded region enclosed by $\gamma$ as $\tilde{\gamma}$. We say that $\Gamma$ is…