Curves on the torus with few intersections

Igor Balla, Marek Filakovský, Bartłomiej Kielak, Daniel Kráľ, Niklas Schlomberg

Published 2024-12-23Version 1

Aougab and Gaster [Math. Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. 174 (2023), 569--584] proved that any set of simple closed curves on the torus, where any two are non-homotopic and intersect at most $k$ times, has a maximum size of $k+O(\sqrt{k}\log k)$. We prove the maximum size of such a set is at most $k+O(1)$ and determine the exact maximum size for all sufficiently large $k$. In particular, we show that the maximum does not exceed $k+4$ when $k$ is large.