Insecurity for compact surfaces of positive genus

Abstract

A pair of points in a riemannian manifold $M$ is secure if the geodesics between the points can be blocked by a finite number of point obstacles; otherwise the pair of points is insecure. A manifold is secure if all pairs of points in $M$ are secure. A manifold is insecure if there exists an insecure point pair, and totally insecure if all point pairs are insecure. Compact, flat manifolds are secure. A standing conjecture says that these are the only secure, compact riemannian manifolds. We prove this for surfaces of genus greater than zero. We also prove that a closed surface of genus greater than one with any riemannian metric and a closed surface of genus one with generic metric are totally insecure.

37 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Blocking light in compact Riemannian manifolds
• Topological entropy and blocking cost for geodesics in riemannian manifolds

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Capillary floating and the billiard ball problem
• On recurrence and ergodicity for geodesic flows on noncompact periodic polygonal surfaces