Related papers: Finding planar surfaces in knot- and link-manifold…
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…
Consider a graph drawn on a surface (for example, the plane minus a finite set of obstacle points), possibly with crossings. We provide an algorithm to decide whether such a drawing can be untangled, namely, if one can slide the vertices…
We study a canonical spanning surface obtained from a knot or link diagram depending on a given Kauffman state, and give a sufficient condition for the surface to be essential. By using the essential surface, we can see the triviality and…
In this article, we propose a new approach for describing and understanding knots and links in a 3-manifold through the use of an embedded non-orientable surface. Specifically, we define a plat-like representation based on this…
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…
This paper is the fifth and final in a series on embedded minimal surfaces. Following our earlier papers on disks, we prove here two main structure theorems for non-simply connected embedded minimal surfaces of any given fixed genus. The…
We present a new, practical algorithm to test whether a knot complement contains a closed essential surface. This property has important theoretical and algorithmic consequences; however, systematically testing it has until now been…
Given a closed four-manifold $X$ with an indefinite intersection form, we consider smoothly embedded surfaces in $X \setminus $int$(B^4)$, with boundary a knot $K \subset S^3$. We give several methods to bound the genus of such surfaces in…
We consider the problem of cutting a set of edges on a polyhedral manifold surface, possibly with boundary, to obtain a single topological disk, minimizing either the total number of cut edges or their total length. We show that this…
We show that if a knot or link has n thin levels when put in thin position then its exterior contains a collection of n disjoint, non-parallel, planar, meridional, essential surfaces. A corollary is that there are at least n/3 tetrahedra in…
We show that if C is a simple closed curve bounding an embedded disk in a closed 3-manifold M, then there exists a disk D in M with boundary C such that D minimizes the area among the embedded disks with boundary C. Moreover, D is smooth,…
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…
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 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…
For a given spatial graph $\mathcal{G} \subset \mathbb{R}^3$, we would like to find a closed orientable surface $\mathcal{S}$ embedded in $\mathbb{R}^3$ in which $\mathcal{G}$ is cellular embedded. However, for general $\mathcal{G}$ this is…
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…
Every link is shown to be presentable as a boundary of an unknotted flat banded surface. A (flat) banded link is defined as a boundary of an unknotted (flat) banded surface. A link's (flat) band index is defined as the minimum number of…
3D printing of surfaces has become an established method for prototyping and visualisation. However, surfaces often contain certain degenerations, such as self-intersecting faces or non-manifold parts, which pose problems in obtaining a 3D…
We define a special case of tree decompositions for planar graphs that respect a given embedding of the graph. We study the analogous width of the resulting decomposition we call the embedded-width of a plane graph. We show both upper…
A triangulation of a surface is irreducible if there is no edge whose contraction produces another triangulation of the surface. In this work we propose an algorithm that constructs the set of irreducible triangulations of any surface with…