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Inspired by the works of Forman on discrete Morse theory, which is a combinatorial adaptation to cell complexes of classical Morse theory on manifolds, we introduce a discrete analogue of the stratified Morse theory of Goresky and MacPherson. We describe the basics of this theory and prove fundamental theorems relating the topology of a general simplicial complex with the critical simplices of a discrete stratified Morse function on the complex. We also provide an algorithm that constructs a discrete stratified Morse function out of an arbitrary function defined on a finite simplicial complex; this is different from simply constructing a discrete Morse function on such a complex. We borrow Forman's idea of a "user's guide," where we give simple examples to convey the utility of our theory.
@InProceedings{knudson_et_al:LIPIcs.SoCG.2018.54,
author = {Knudson, Kevin and Wang, Bei},
title = {{Discrete Stratified Morse Theory: A User's Guide}},
booktitle = {34th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2018)},
pages = {54:1--54:14},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-066-8},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2018},
volume = {99},
editor = {Speckmann, Bettina and T\'{o}th, Csaba D.},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2018.54},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-87671},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2018.54},
annote = {Keywords: Discrete Morse theory, stratified Morse theory, topological data analysis}
}