Translation surfaces with no convex presentation (Q903082)

A translation surface is a union of polygons with pairs of parallel edges identified by translation, up to cut and paste equivalence. The cut and paste equivalence means that the same translation surface has many presentations as unions of polygons. A natural question is whether there is such a presentation, in which the polygon can be taken to be convex. In 1992 Veech was the first to exhibit a surface with no presentations as convex polygons. The authors review his examples and give new ones which include the Veech double \(n\)-gons, the Escher staircases, the Ward examples and the Bouw-Moeller examples. Translation surfaces are naturally grouped in strata, which are moduli spaces of translation surfaces for which the combinatorics of singularities is fixed. In this paper the authors take up the question of classifying surfaces with no convex presentations in the simples strata, namely the genus-two strata \(H(2)\) and \(H(1,1)\). They give infinite lists of translation surfaces with no convex presentations. The authors classify also the surfaces in the stratum \(H(2)\) which do not have strictly convex presentations.