Doodles on surfaces

TL;DR

This paper extends the concept of doodles from the 2-sphere to all closed orientable surfaces, proving uniqueness of minimal forms and introducing virtual doodles with a correspondence to planar doodles.

Contribution

It generalizes doodles to arbitrary surfaces, establishes minimal representative uniqueness, and introduces virtual doodles with a natural correspondence to surface doodles.

Findings

Uniqueness of minimal doodle representatives on surfaces

Examples of doodles with minimal forms

Introduction of virtual doodles and their correspondence

Abstract

Doodles were introduced in [R. Fenn and P. Taylor, Introducing doodles, Topology of low-dimensional manifolds, pp. 37--43, Lecture Notes in Math., 722, Springer, Berlin, 1979] but were restricted to embedded circles in the 2-sphere. Khovanov, [M. Khovanov, Doodle groups, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 349 (1997), 2297--2315], extended the idea to immersed circles in the 2-sphere. In this paper we further extend the range of doodles to any closed orientable surface. Uniqueness of minimal representatives is proved, and various example of doodles are given with their minimal representatives. We also introduce the notion of virtual doodles, and show that there is a natural one-to-one correspondence between doodles on surfaces and virtual doodles on the plane.