Building on Whitney’s classical method of triangulating smooth manifolds, we show that every compact d-dimensional smooth manifold admits a triangulation with dual graph of twin-width at most d^O(d). In particular, it follows that every compact 3-manifold has a triangulation with dual graph of bounded twin-width. This is in sharp contrast to the case of treewidth, where for any natural number n there exists a closed 3-manifold such that every triangulation thereof has dual graph with treewidth at least n. To establish this result, we bound the twin-width of the dual graph of the d-skeleton of the second barycentric subdivision of the 2d-dimensional hypercubic honeycomb. We also show that every compact, piecewise-linear (hence smooth) d-dimensional manifold has triangulations where the dual graph has an arbitrarily large twin-width.
@InProceedings{bonnet_et_al:LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.23, author = {Bonnet, \'{E}douard and Husz\'{a}r, Krist\'{o}f}, title = {{On the Twin-Width of Smooth Manifolds}}, booktitle = {41st International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2025)}, pages = {23:1--23:16}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-370-6}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2025}, volume = {332}, editor = {Aichholzer, Oswin and Wang, Haitao}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.23}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-231752}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.23}, annote = {Keywords: Smooth manifolds, triangulations, twin-width, Whitney embedding theorem, structural graph parameters, computational topology} }
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