An efficient algorithm for the stratification and triangulation of an algebraic surface (Q1037650)

The analysis of the topology of real (algebraic) curves and surfaces turns to be an important tool in many practical situations. In this paper, the authors present a method to compute the topology of a real algebraic surface which implicit defining polynomial is given over the field of rational numbers. For that, they compute a stratification of the surface S into \({\mathcal O}(\deg(S))\) non-singular cells, including the adjacency information among them. The method is based on a projection and applies numerical and combinatorial methods to minimize the cost of the symbolic computations. In addition, a complete C++ implementation of the stratification algorithm is presented showing a good performance for well-known examples from algebraic geometry.