# Enumeration of meanders and Masur-Veech volumes

## TL;DR

This paper derives simple asymptotic formulas for counting meanders with fixed topological type, using connections to square-tiled surfaces and Masur-Veech volumes, advancing understanding of their enumeration.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel approach linking meander enumeration to Masur-Veech volumes and asymptotic analysis of quadratic differentials, providing explicit formulas.

## Key findings

- Derived asymptotic formulas for fixed topological type meanders
- Connected meander enumeration to Masur-Veech volumes of moduli spaces
- Established asymptotic independence of horizontal and vertical structures

## Abstract

A meander is a topological configuration of a line and a simple closed curve in the plane (or a pair of simple closed curves on the 2-sphere) intersecting transversally. Meanders can be traced back to H. Poincar\'e and naturally appear in various areas of mathematics, theoretical physics and computational biology (in particular, they provide a model of polymer folding). Enumeration of meanders is an important open problem. The number of meanders with 2N crossings grows exponentially when N grows, but the longstanding problem on the precise asymptotics is still out of reach. We show that the situation becomes more tractable if one additionally fixes the topological type (or the total number of minimal arcs) of a meander. Then we are able to derive simple asymptotic formulas for the numbers of meanders as N tends to infinity. We also compute the asymptotic probability of getting a simple closed curve on a sphere by identifying the endpoints of two arc systems (one on each of the two hemispheres) along the common equator. The new tools we bring to bear are based on interpretation of meanders as square-tiled surfaces with one horizontal and one vertical cylinders. The proofs combine recent results on Masur-Veech volumes of the moduli spaces of meromorphic quadratic differentials in genus zero with our new observation that horizontal and vertical separatrix diagrams of integer quadratic differentials are asymptotically uncorrelated. The additional combinatorial constraints we impose in this article yield explicit polynomial asymptotics.