Intersections of curves on surfaces (Q1064615)

In the terminology of the authors, a loop is a 1-gon on a surface F if it is homotopic to its vertex in its interior on F. Two arcs form a 2-gon if one is homotopic to the other through the interior on F with fixed endpoints. All curves used in the homotopy are assumed to be general position curves. The two main theorems are: 1. If f is an arc or loop on an orientable surface F which is homotopic to an embedding but is not embedded, then there is an embedded 1- or 2-gon on F bounded by arcs of f. A counterexample is given for the annulus for a similar statement involving two curves. 2. If f is an arc or loop on an orientable surface F with more than the minimum number of self-intersections in its homotopy class, then there is a singular 1- or 2-gon on F bounded by arcs of f. If the hypothesis of orientability is dropped, a similar theorem can be proved only if the restriction on the admissable homotopies is dropped. The paper contains many more results and examples and counterexamples, in particular a construction for surfaces of genus \(>2\) of a curve that is not homotopic to a curve on an incompressible subsurface. The authors also mention a number of open questions.