Doodles on surfaces I: An introduction to their basic properties

Andrew Bartholomew, Roger Fenn, Naoko Kamada, Seiichi Kamada

Published 2016-12-27Version 1

Doodles were introduced in [R. Fenn and P. Taylor, Introducing doodles, Topology of low-dimensional manifolds, pp. 37--43, Lecture Notes in Math., 722, Springer, Berlin, 1979] but were restricted to embedded circles in the 2-sphere. Khovanov, [M. Khovanov, Doodle groups, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 349 (1997), 2297--2315], extended the idea to immersed circles in the 2-sphere. In this paper we further extend the range of doodles to any closed orientable surfaces.