On lacets and their manifolds (Q5936039)

A topological lacet is the embedding, with self-intersections, of a closed curve in a 2-manifold, such that (1) all self-intersections are simple double points at which the curve crosses itself, and (2) the complement of the curve in the 2-manifold is a 2-colorable family of discs. Such embeddings are characterized, up to homotopy, by a combinatorial lacet, that is, by a double occurrence word \(\Delta\) on an alphabet \(P\) and a bipartition \((K,L)\) of the set \(P\), \(P\) presenting the set of self-intersections of the curve, \(\Delta\) their sequence in one complete run along the curve, and \(K\), \(L\) the two types of reentry possible at a crossing. Passing by the construction of a map associated to the lacet, the authors show that every combinatorial lacet is representable on a 2-manifold. Moreover, they present procedures for determining if a combinatorial lacet is representable on the torus or on the Klein bottle.