A class of open surfaces with algorithmically solvable homeomorphism problem

Abstract

We introduce a new class of possibly noncompact n-dimensional manifolds without boundary associated to finite data which we call topological automata. This class is large enough to contain many interesting examples of open 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional manifolds of interest to low-dimensional topologists. Our main result is that the homeomorphism problem in this class is decidable for n = 2.