Decomposition and Enumeration of Triangulated Surfaces

Abstract

We describe some theoretical results on triangulations of surfaces and we develop a theory on roots, decompositions and genus-surfaces. We apply this theory to describe an algorithm to list all triangulations of closed surfaces with at most a fixed number of vertices. We specialize the theory for the case where the number of vertices is at most 11 and we get theoretical restrictions on genus-surfaces allowing us to get the list of triangulations of closed surfaces with at most 11 vertices.