From Curves to Words and Back Again: Geometric Computation of Minimum-Area Homotopy

Hsien-Chih Chang, Brittany Terese Fasy, Bradley McCoy +2

Let $\gamma$ be a generic closed curve in the plane. Samuel Blank, in his 1967 Ph.D. thesis, determined if $\gamma$ is self-overlapping by geometrically constructing a combinatorial word fro…