Ernie's 3D Pancakes

Computational topology at SOCG 2013

As usual, the list of papers accepted to the 2013 Symposium on Computational Geometry includes several papers on computational topology — by my count, at least 12 papers out of 48, which is not as overwhelming as last year, but still a healthy fraction of the conference.  Here is a (likely incomplete) list, with links to as many preprints as I could find.

• A new approach to crushing 3-manifold triangulations
  by Benjamin A. Burton

• Computing closed essential surfaces in knot complements
  by Benjamin A. Burton, Alexander Coward, and Stephan Tillmann

• Counting and sampling minimum cuts in genus g graphs
  by Erin Chambers, Kyle Fox, and Amir Nayyeri

• Efficiently hex-meshing things(,) with topology
  by Jeff Erickson

• Geometry in the space of persistence modules and diagrams
  by Vin de Silva and Vidit Nanda

• Graph induced complex on point data [no preprint available]
  by Tamal Dey, Fengtao Fan, and Yusu Wang

• Homological reconstruction and simplification in R³ 
  by Dominique Attali, Ulrich Bauer, Olivier Devillers, Marc Glisse, and André Lieutier.

• Localized Delaunay refinement for piecewise-smooth complexes [no preprint available]
  by Tamal Dey and Andrew Slatton.

• Measuring similarity between curves on 2-manifolds via homotopy area
  by Erin Chambers and Yusu Wang

• Parameterized complexity of discrete Morse theory
  by João Paixão, Jonathan Spreer, Benjamin A. Burton, and Thomas Lewiner

• Topological graphs: Empty triangles and disjoint matchings [no preprint available]
  by Andres J. Ruiz-Vargas and Radoslav Fulek

• Zigzag zoology: Rips zigzags for homology inference
  by Steve Oudot and Don Sheehy

Busy busy

• I am the chair of the newly elected computational geometry steering committee; the other members are Mark de Berg, David Eppstein (secretary), Joe Mitchell, and Günter Rote. There should be an official announcement on the computational geometry mailing list in the next few days.

• I am attending the CCC Leadership in Science Policy Institute next month.

• Thanks to Salil Vadhan's kind invitation, I will join the SIGACT Committtee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science this summer.

Whew! I'll post more about each of these activities in the coming months.