Tracing isomanifolds in Rd in time polynomial in d using Coxeter–Freudenthal–Kuhn triangulations

Isomanifolds are the generalization of isosurfaces to arbitrary dimension and codimension, i.e., submanifolds of Rd defined as the zero set of some multivariate multivalued smooth function f:Rd→Rd−n, where n is the intrinsic dimension of the manifold. A natural way to approximate a smooth isomanifold M=f−1(0) is to consider its piecewise linear (PL) approximation M^ based on a triangulation T of the ambient space Rd. In this paper, we describe a simple algorithm to trace isomanifolds from a given starting point. The algorithm works for arbitrary dimensions n and d, and any precision D. Our main result is that, when f (or M) has bounded complexity, the complexity of the algorithm is polynomial in d and δ=1/D (and unavoidably exponential in n). Since it is known that for δ=Ω(d2.5), M^ is O(D2)-close and isotopic to M , our algorithm produces a faithful PL-approximation of isomanifolds of bounded complexity in time polynomial in d. Combining this algorithm with dimensionality reduction techniques, the dependency on d in the size of M^ can be completely removed with high probability. We also show that the algorithm can handle isomanifolds with boundary and, more generally, isostratifolds. The algorithm for isomanifolds with boundary has been implemented and experimental results are reported, showing that it is practical and can handle cases that are far ahead of the state-of-the-art.