All 2-manifolds have finitely many minimal triangulations (Q581883)

Shrinking an edge e in a triangulation of a manifold M means to replace the star st(e) by the cone over its boundary. If this yields another triangulation of M, then e is called shrinkable. The converse process is called vertex splitting. Clearly, every triangulation of M can be obtained by vertex splitting from a triangulation that is minimal in the sense that it contains no shrinkable edges.A theorem of Steinitz asserts that the only minimal triangulation of the 2-sphere is the tetrahedron. The authors [ibid. 62, No.1, 90-98 (1988; Zbl 0654.57010)] proved that the number of minimal triangulations of any given orientable surface is finite. In the present paper, they extend their result to arbitrary surfaces, using similar methods.