Finding weakly simple closed quasigeodesics on polyhedral spheres (Q6145671)

\textit{A. V. Pogorelov}, [Mat. Sb., Nov. Ser. 25(67), 275--306 (1949; Zbl 0041.08902)] proved the existence of a simple closed quasigeodesic on any convex polyhedron. The authors consider a similar problem for so-called polyhedral spheres. Such spheres are glued from a finite set of Euclidean polygons and are not a priori embedded in \(\mathbb{R}^3\). Theorem 1.1 states that for a polyhedral sphere \(S\) there exists a weakly simple closed quasigeodesic of length at most \(M\). Here \(M\) denotes the edge-sum of \(S\), i.e., the sum of the lengths of the edges of an iterated barycentric subdivision of a triangulation of \(S\), and a weakly simple curve is a limit of simple curves on \(S\). The authors prove in Theorem 1.2 that it is possible to construct a weakly simple closed quasigeodesic, in exponential time with respect to \(n\) and \([M/h]\), where \(n\) is the number of vertices of \(S\) and \(h\) is the smallest altitude over all triangles of some triangulation of \(S\). This theorem answers a question suggested by \textit{E. D. Demaine} et al. [LIPIcs -- Leibniz Int. Proc. Inform. 164, Article 33, 13 p. (2020; Zbl 07760162)].