Irreducible Triangulations of Surfaces with Boundary

Alexandre Boulch (1) , Éric Colin de Verdière (2) , Atsuhiro Nakamoto (3)

1 X - École polytechnique
2 DI-ENS - Département d'informatique - ENS Paris
3 Yokohama National University

A triangulation of a surface is irreducible if no edge can be contracted to produce a triangulation of the same surface. In this paper, we investigate irreducible triangulations of surfaces with boundary. We prove that the number of vertices of an irreducible triangulation of a (possibly non-orientable) surface of genus g ≥ 0 with b ≥ 0 boundary components is O(g + b). So far, the result was known only for surfaces without boundary (b = 0). While our technique yields a worse constant in the O(.) notation, the present proof is elementary, and simpler than the previous ones in the case of surfaces without boundary.

Domains: Computational Geometry [cs.CG]

Alexandre Boulch, Éric Colin de Verdière, Atsuhiro Nakamoto. Irreducible Triangulations of Surfaces with Boundary. Graphs and Combinatorics, 2013, 29 (6), pp.1675-1688. ⟨10.1007/s00373-012-1244-1⟩. ⟨hal-01163747⟩