Normal surface

Relative to a triangulation, a normal surface meets every tetrahedron in disjoint normal disks: four types of triangles cutting off vertices and three types of quadrilaterals separating opposite pairs of edges. A normal disk meets any edge at most once; its face arcs join distinct edges. Two different quadrilateral types cannot coexist in a tetrahedron.

For $t$ tetrahedra, count the seven disk types in each tetrahedron. Across each glued face the counts of each of its three normal arc types must agree. These are homogeneous linear equations with integer coefficients. An admissible solution also has at most one nonzero quadrilateral type in each tetrahedron. Matching the arcs in their boundary order reconstructs the normal surface up to an isotopy preserving the tetrahedra.

The weight of a normal surface counts its intersections with the edges of the triangulation. It is a positive linear function of its coordinates: each corner of a normal disk contributes the reciprocal of the number of tetrahedral sectors around its edge. Thus a nontrivial decomposition into compatible coordinate vectors gives both summands strictly smaller weight.

The Haken sum of compatible normal surfaces is obtained by resolving their intersection curves in the way that preserves the normal disk types. It adds normal surface coordinates, Euler characteristic and mod-two homology classes. The alternative local resolution can create returning face arcs and need not be normal.

A fundamental normal surface has a nonzero admissible coordinate vector which is not the sum of two nonzero admissible vectors. Fixing the allowed quadrilateral type in every tetrahedron reduces the problem to the Hilbert basis of a rational cone. There are finitely many choices of quadrilateral types and finitely many indecomposable vectors for each choice.