Frontier and closure of a semi-Pfaffian set (Q1389175)

The Pfaffian functions are analytic functions satisfying a triangular system of Pfaffian differential equations with polynomial coefficients. A semi-Pfaffian set is a real semianalytic set defined by equations and inequalities between Pfaffian functions. The main result of this paper says that for a semi-Pfaffian set in an open domain \(G\), the frontier and closure in \(G\) are represented as semi-Pfaffian sets. The complexity of this representation is estimated in terms of the complexity of the original set. The proof uses some finiteness properties of semi-Pfaffian sets, based on the estimate of the multiplicity of Pfaffian intersections and the reduction to semialgebraic quantifier elimination. Some applications to fewnominal semialgebraic sets are given.