Related papers: The distance between two separating, reducing slop…
Suppose M is a compact orientable irreducible 3-manifold with Heegaard splitting surfaces P and Q. Then either Q is isotopic to a possibly stabilized copy of P or the Hempel distance of the splitting P is no greater than twice the genus of…
If $\Sigma$ and $\Sigma'$ are homotopic embedded surfaces in a $4$-manifold then they may be related by a regular homotopy (at the expense of introducing double points) or by a sequence of stabilisations and destabilisations (at the expense…
Let ${\cal T}$ be a triangulation of a set ${\cal P}$ of $n$ points in the plane, and let $e$ be an edge shared by two triangles in ${\cal T}$ such that the quadrilateral $Q$ formed by these two triangles is convex. A {\em flip} of $e$ is…
Flip graphs are a ubiquitous class of graphs, which encode relations induced on a set of combinatorial objects by elementary, local changes. Skeletons of associahedra, for instance, are the graphs induced by quadrilateral flips in…
Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane, its separability is the minimum number of lines needed to separate all its pairs of points from each other. We show that the minimum number of lines needed to separate $n$ points, picked randomly…
Given a finite $n$-element set $X$, a family of subsets ${\mathcal F}\subset 2^X$ is said to separate $X$ if any two elements of $X$ are separated by at least one member of $\mathcal F$. It is shown that if $|\mathcal F|>2^{n-1}$, then one…
Given two shapes $A$ and $B$ in the plane with Hausdorff distance $1$, is there a shape $S$ with Hausdorff distance $1/2$ to and from $A$ and $B$? The answer is always yes, and depending on convexity of $A$ and/or $B$, $S$ may be convex,…
Consider a surface $S$ and let $M\subset S$. If $S\setminus M$ is not connected, then we say $M$ \emph{separates} $S$, and we refer to $M$ as a \emph{separating set} of $S$. If $M$ separates $S$, and no proper subset of $M$ separates $S$,…
We study distance relations in various simplicial complexes associated with low-dimensional manifolds. In particular, complexes satisfying certain topological conditions with vertices as simple multi-curves. We obtain bounds on the…
Let P_1 and P_2 be two sets of points in the plane, so that P_1 is contained in a line L_1, P_2 is contained in a line L_2, and L_1 and L_2 are neither parallel nor orthogonal. Then the number of distinct distances determined by the pairs…
It is proved that the number of shortest paths between two vertices of distance $t$ in a graph with degrees bounded by $\Delta$ is at most $2 \cdot (\frac{\Delta}{2})^t$. This improves upon the na\"ive $\Delta (\Delta-1) ^{t-1}$ bound.
Given two binary trees on $N$ labeled leaves, the quartet distance between the trees is the number of disagreeing quartets. By permuting the leaves at random, the expected quartets distance between the two trees is…
A (multi)set of segments in the plane may form a TSP tour, a matching, a tree, or any multigraph. If two segments cross, then we can reduce the total length with the following flip operation. We remove a pair of crossing segments, and…
We consider the number of distinct distances between two finite sets of points in ${\bf R}^k$, for any constant dimension $k\ge 2$, where one set $P_1$ consists of $n$ points on a line $l$, and the other set $P_2$ consists of $m$ arbitrary…
In this article, we define the contact surgery distance of two contact 3-manifolds $(M,\xi)$ and $(M',\xi')$ as the minimal number of contact surgeries needed to obtain $(M,\xi)$ from $(M',\xi')$. Our main result states that the contact…
It is known that every planar graph has a planar embedding where edges are represented by non-crossing straight-line segments. We study the planar slope number, i.e., the minimum number of distinct edge-slopes in such a drawing of a planar…
Computing the Fr\'{e}chet distance for surfaces is a surprisingly hard problem and the only known algorithm is limited to computing it between flat surfaces. We adapt this algorithm to create one for computing the Fr\'{e}chet distance for a…
For n-bridge decompositions of links in S^3, we propose a practical method to ensure that the Hempel distance is at least two.
According to their strength, the tracing properties of a code can be categorized as frameproof, separating, IPP and TA. It is known that if the minimum distance of the code is larger than a certain threshold then the TA property implies the…
We show that the number of stabilizations needed to interchange the handlebodies of a Heegaard splitting of a closed 3-manifold by an isotopy is bounded below by the smaller of twice its genus or half its Hempel distance. This is a…