English

Finding non-orientable surfaces in 3-manifolds

Geometric Topology 2016-09-02 v2 Computational Geometry

Abstract

We investigate the complexity of finding an embedded non-orientable surface of Euler genus gg in a triangulated 33-manifold. This problem occurs both as a natural question in low-dimensional topology, and as a first non-trivial instance of embeddability of complexes into 33-manifolds. We prove that the problem is NP-hard, thus adding to the relatively few hardness results that are currently known in 3-manifold topology. In addition, we show that the problem lies in NP when the Euler genus g is odd, and we give an explicit algorithm in this case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1602.07907,
  title  = {Finding non-orientable surfaces in 3-manifolds},
  author = {Benjamin A. Burton and Arnaud de Mesmay and Uli Wagner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.07907},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

v2: minor changes

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:57:41.176Z