Counting Number of Triangulations of Point Sets: Reinterpreting and Generalizing the Triangulation Polynomials

Abstract

We describe a framework that unifies the two types of polynomials introduced respectively by Bacher and Mouton and by Rutschmann and Wettstein to analyze the number of triangulations of point sets. Using this insight, we generalize the triangulation polynomials of chains to a wider class of near-edges, enabling efficient computation of the number of triangulations of certain families of point sets. We use the framework to try to improve the result in Rutschmann and Wettstein without success, suggesting that their result is close to optimal.