The minimal genus of homology classes in a finite 2–complex
Thorben Kastenholz, Mark Pedron · Algebraic & Geometric Topology · 2022
We study surface representatives of homology classes of finite complexes which minimize certain complexity measures, including its genus and Euler characteristic. Our main result is that up to surgery at nullhomotopic curves minimizers are homotopic to cellwise coverings to the 2-skeleton. From this we conclude that the minimizing problem is in general algorithmically undecidable, but can be solved for 2-dimensional CAT(-1)-complexes.