Difference between revisions of "The County Problem" - Rhea

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The County Problem - A Topological Argument

 keyword: tutorial, inside county, closed curve, curve 

INTRODUCTION In this tutorial / exploration, I'll talk a little about topology, and a little about programming, with the goal of showing you that thinking mathematically can really get you out of a pickle sometimes.

 Contents
- The Problem
- The Solution
- Why it works
- References

The problem

The problem we want to solve here is as follows: we want to create a computer function which takes an Indiana longitude and latitude value as input, and returns the county in which this point lies. At first this seems like a rather simple problem, for when one looks at a county and some point inside the county, they can immediately see whether the point is inside the county. For example:

The problem I will tackle here is very specific, and applicable to many areas of computer programming. I stumbled upon it when I was working on storing map data in a database. The problem was I had a database of address information which was stored as just a text entry. In other words, the data for a given address was just a string, such as "EXAMPLE ADDRESS". We wanted to add and we needed to get from this information

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The solution

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Why it works

- Explain what a homeomorphism is

Now why does this work? It seems like a magical fact which I just pulled out of my pocket. But the great thing about this particular mathematical fact is that it's something which we can easily argue. So here I'll present the outline of a proof. The idea is that if we were to take a large circle, we can bend continuously, and with rather strict rules, into an arbitrary simple, closed curve (a curve which is simple and curved is commonly called a Jordan Curve). These strict rules preserve a specific property of the curve which corresponds to the insideness of the chosen point.

Imagine you start with some arbitrary curve in the plane, and you're interested in whether a point is inside or outside the curve:

Now imagine you draw a ray from that point in an arbitrary direction in the plane, and that we focus on the number of intersections that line makes with the sides or the curve:

It is not yet clear what the relationship is between the number of intersections and the insideness of the point, but we can try to reduce the situation to a simpler situation. Imagine the various deformations of the curve which preserve insideness and the effect these has on the number of intersections:

Type 1: A homeomorphism which preserves both number of intersections and insideness

Type 2: A homeomorphism which preserves insideness, but not number of intersections

Type 3: A homeomorphism which preserves neither number of intersections or insideness

Note then that the first two homeomorphisms and the inverse of the second preserve insideness. Because every Jordan curve is homeomorphic to the unit circle, we know there exists a homeomorphism between the two, and it is easy to see that this homeomorphism can be broken down into type 1, type 2, type 3, and the inverse of type 2 and type 3 homeomorphisms.

Theorem:

A point is inside a closed curve ""if and only if"" any ray going away from this point intersects the curve an odd number of times.

Outline of proof:

First note that every closed simple loop, or Jordan curve is homeomorphic to the unit circle. Then it easily follows that given an arbitrary curve in the plane, and a point within it, there exists a "smooth transformation" of the curve into the unit circle about that point. This is evident because given some coordinate system, there exists a smooth mapping between the curve and the unit circle, and there then exists a linear transformation of this unit circle about the origin into a unit circle about the point in question.

Once we are aware that there exists this smooth transition we can focus on how this property, the number of intersections of a ray with the curve, with time t. The trick is that there are only a couple isolated points in t ∈ [0, 1] of these transition functions in which ......

REFERENCES

[1] "Loream Ipsum" <http://www.lipsum.com/>.

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