Computing Dehn Twists and Geometric Intersection Numbers in Polynomial Time

Simple curves on surfaces are often represented as sequences of intersections with a triangulation. However, there are much more succinct ways of representing simple curves used in topology such as normal coordinates. In these representations, the length of a curve can be exponential in the size of its representation. Nevertheless, we show that the following two basic tasks of computational topology, namely

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CCCG
• Authors: Marcus Schaefer, Eric Sedgwick, Daniel Stefankovic
• Keywords: CCCG 2008, Computational Geometry, Normal Coordinate, Simple Curves, Succinct Normal Coordinate