A new formula for winding number (Q1801627)

Let \(\gamma\) be a closed oriented planar curve having only finitely many crossings, passing through each crossing point only twice and having linearly independent tangents at each crossing point. Such a curve partitions its complement into a finite number of connected open regions. In ``A six vertex theorem for bounding normal planar curves'' (Preprint) the authors and \textit{M. Özdemir} proved the following lemma: One can associate integers to each of the regions of the complement of \(\gamma\) such that at each segment of \(\gamma\) the number to the left of \(\gamma\) is 1 greater than the number to the right, and the outside region is numbered zero. Moreover, such a numbering is unique. Considering the curved polygonal domains \(S_ i\) obtained as the closure of the union of the regions with a number greater than \(i\) (in the case \(i>0)\) resp. less than \(i\) (in the case \(i<0)\) the authors obtain the following theorem: The winding number of \(\gamma\) is given by \(\omega(\gamma)=\sum_{i>0}\chi(S_ i)-\sum_{i<0}\chi(S_ i)\), \(\chi\) denoting the Euler characteristic. The major part of this paper is to show how the lemma can be generalized to curves of the type mentioned above on closed orientable surfaces and how an analogous formula to that in the theorem may be obtained for these curves.