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Untangling Planar Curves

Authors Hsien-Chih Chang, Jeff Erickson

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Hsien-Chih Chang
Jeff Erickson

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Hsien-Chih Chang and Jeff Erickson. Untangling Planar Curves. In 32nd International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2016). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 51, pp. 29:1-29:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2016)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2016.29

Abstract

Any generic closed curve in the plane can be transformed into a simple closed curve by a finite sequence of local transformations called homotopy moves. We prove that simplifying a planar closed curve with n self-crossings requires Theta(n^{3/2}) homotopy moves in the worst case. Our algorithm improves the best previous upper bound O(n^2), which is already implicit in the classical work of Steinitz; the matching lower bound follows from the construction of closed curves with large defect, a topological invariant of generic closed curves introduced by Aicardi and Arnold. This lower bound also implies that Omega(n^{3/2}) degree-1 reductions, series-parallel reductions, and Delta-Y transformations are required to reduce any planar graph with treewidth Omega(sqrt{n}) to a single edge, matching known upper bounds for rectangular and cylindrical grid graphs. Finally, we prove that Omega(n^2) homotopy moves are required in the worst case to transform one non-contractible closed curve on the torus to another; this lower bound is tight if the curve is homotopic to a simple closed curve.
Keywords
  • computational topology
  • homotopy
  • planar graphs
  • Delta-Y transformations
  • defect
  • Reidemeister moves
  • tangles

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