Some Minimal Shape Decompositions Are Nice

Abstract: In some sense, the world is composed of shapes and words, of continuous things and discrete things. The recognition and study of continuous objects in the form of shapes occupies a significant part of the effort of unraveling many geometric questions. Shapes can be rep- resented with great generality by objects called currents. While the enormous variety and representational power of currents is useful for representing a huge variety of phenomena, it also leads to the problem that knowing something is a respectable current tells you little about how nice or regular it is. In these brief notes I give an intuitive explanation of a result that says that an important class of minimal shape decompositions will be nice if the input shape (current) is nice. These notes are an exposition of the paper by Ibrahim, Krishnamoorthy and Vixie which can be found on the arXiv:1411.0882 and any reference to these notes, should include a reference to that paper as well.