Heegaard spines of 3-manifolds (Q812812)

The author generalizes a bijoin construction described in her joint paper [\textit{P. Bandieri} and \textit{C. Gagliardi}, Rend. Circ. Mat. Palermo, II Ser. 31, 233--246 (1982; Zbl 0492.57006)] to produce a pseudotriangulation of a closed connected 3-manifold \(M\) equipped with a Heegaard diagram. The result is an encoding of the manifold \(M\) by a 4-coloured graph. As a consequence, to each Heegaard diagram of \(M\) canonically corresponds a combinatorial structure called a Heegaard spine associated to the diagram.