Self-intersections in combinatorial topology: statistical structure

DOI10.1007/S00222-011-0350-7MaRDI QIDQ421024zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Moira Chas, Steven P. Lalley

Publication date 23 May 2012

Published in Inventiones Mathematicae (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1012.0580

zbMATH Keywords

closed orientable surfacerandom words in generators of fundamental group

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Dynamical systems of geometric origin and hyperbolicity (geodesic and horocycle flows, etc.) (37D40) Fundamental group, presentations, free differential calculus (57M05) Markov chains (discrete-time Markov processes on discrete state spaces) (60J10)

Abstract: Oriented closed curves on an orientable surface with boundary are described up to continuous deformation by reduced cyclic words in the generators of the fundamental group and their inverses. By self-intersection number one means the minimum number of transversal self-intersection points of representatives of the class. We prove that if a class is chosen at random from among all classes of $m$ letters, then for large $m$ the distribution of the self-intersection number approaches the Gaussian distribution.

Review text

The authors provide statistical information on the number of self-intersections of randomly chosen oriented closed curves on a given closed orientable surface. Each such curve can be represented as a word with respect to a fixed set of generators of the fundamental group. The main result says that the distribution of the number of self-intersections of a closed oriented curve of fixed word length (uniformly chosen at random) is asymptotically Gaussian. The quite accessible proof employs U-statistics of a suitably crafted Markov chain.

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Cites work

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• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1354815 (Why is no real title available?)
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 765034 (Why is no real title available?)
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 936387 (Why is no real title available?)
• On \(U\)-statistics and von Mises statistics for a special class of Markov chains
• On U-statistics and v. mise? statistics for weakly dependent processes
• Self-intersection numbers of curves in the doubly punctured plane
• Self-intersection numbers of curves on the punctured torus

Cited in

(12)

• Self-intersections of curves on a surface and Bernoulli numbers
• Geometric intersections of loops on surfaces
• A central limit theorem for random closed geodesics: proof of the Chas-Li-Maskit conjecture
• Estimating the self-intersection number of closed curves on surface by knot method
• Statistical regularities of self-intersection counts for geodesics on negatively curved surfaces
• Curves on surfaces, charts, and words
• Almost simple geodesics on the triply-punctured sphere
• Central limit theorems for counting measures in coarse negative curvature
• Experiments suggesting that the distribution of the hyperbolic length of closed geodesics sampling by word length is Gaussian
• Intersection number, length, and systole on compact hyperbolic surfaces
• Self-intersections of arcs on a pair of pants
• Central limit theorems for Green metrics on hyperbolic groups

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