English

Measuring complexity of curves on surfaces

Geometric Topology 2018-07-20 v2

Abstract

We consider the relations between different measures of complexity for free homotopy classes of curves on a surface Σ\Sigma, including the minimum number of self-intersections, the minimum length of the words representing them in a geometric presentation of π1(Σ)\pi_1(\Sigma), and the minimum degree of the coverings of Σ\Sigma to which they lift as embeddings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.06671,
  title  = {Measuring complexity of curves on surfaces},
  author = {Max Neumann-Coto and Macarena Covadonga Robles Arenas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.06671},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

14 pages,12 figures. Exposition has been improved giving more details and examples

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:22:15.664Z