English

Whitney's formulas for curves on surfaces

Geometric Topology 2019-02-06 v2

Abstract

The classical Whitney formula relates the number of times an oriented plane curve cuts itself to its rotation number and the index of a base point. In this paper we generalize Whitney's formula to curves on an oriented punctured surface. To define analogs of the rotation number and the index of a base point of a curve, we fix an arbitrary vector field on the surface. Similar formulas are obtained for non-based curves.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0911.0393,
  title  = {Whitney's formulas for curves on surfaces},
  author = {Yurii Burman and Michael Polyak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0911.0393},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Published version; 10 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T14:06:27.796Z