Regional knot invariants

In this paper, a regional knot invariant is constructed. Like the Wirtinger presentation of a knot group, each planar region contributes a generator, and each crossing contributes a relation. The invariant is called a tridle of the link. As in the quandle theory, one can define Alexander quandle and get Alexander polynomial from it. For link diagram, one can also define a linear tridle and its presentation matrix. A polynomial invariant can be derived from the matrix just like the Alexander polynomial case.

Möbius bands, unstretchable material sheets and developable surfaces

A Möbius band can be formed by bending a sufficiently long rectangular unstretchable material sheet and joining the two short ends after twisting by 180 ° . This process can be modelled by an isometric mapping from a rectangular region to a developable surface in three-dimensional Euclidean space. Attempts have been made to determine the equilibrium shape of a Möbius band by minimizing the bending energy in the class of mappings from the rectangular region to the collection of developable surfaces. In this work, we show that, although a surface obtained from an isometric mapping of a prescribed planar region must be developable, a mapping from a prescribed planar region to a developable surface is not necessarily isometric. Based on this, we demonstrate that the notion of a rectifying developable cannot be used to describe a pure bending of a rectangular region into a Möbius band or a generic ribbon, as has been erroneously done in many publications. Specifically, our analysis shows that the mapping from a prescribed planar region to a rectifying developable surface is isometric only if that surface is cylindrical with the midline being the generator. Towards providing solutions to this issue, we discuss several alternative modelling strategies that respect the distinction between the physical constraint of unstretchability and the geometrical notion of developability.

Data Visualization Using Weighted Voronoi Diagrams

A Voronoi diagram is a standard spatial tessellation that partitions a domain into sub-regions based on proximity to a fixed set of landmark points. In order to maintain control over the size and shape of these sub-regions, a weighting scheme is often used, in which each landmark has a scalar value associated with it. This suggests a natural “inverse” problem: given a fixed set of landmark points in a given planar region and a set of “desired” areas, is it possible to calculate a set of weights so that each sub-region has a particular area? In this chapter, the authors give a fast scheme for determining these weights based on theory from convex optimization, which is then applied to a variety of problems in data visualization.