Geometry of scrolls (Q2565065)

This paper studies properties of a family of immersed curves in the plane. A smooth regular curve \(c:I \to\mathbb{R}^2\) is said to have a vertex at \(t\in I\) if the derivative of the curvature function vanishes at \(t\). A curve with finitely many vertices, none of which is located at crossings, can be derived into finitely many vertex-free curves. Because their appearance they are called scrolls. The results of this paper deal with the question how scrolls intersect and the classification of topological types of closed curves with fixed number of vertices. For instance, two curves are said to be geotopic if there is a diffeomorphism between neighborhoods of the curves which takes one to the other. This paper presents techniques that allow to determine the minimal number of vertices for a given geotype with small number of crossings.