MICC: Metric In the Curve Complex

For topologists and programmers alike.

MICC is a program based in Python to study the curve complex of low-dimensional orientable surfaces of arbitrary genus.

The curve complex is a simplicial complex composed of vertices representing equivalency classes of isotopic simple closed curves on a surface of fixed genus and of edges drawn between vertices if classes contain a disjoint representative. MICC is a tool designed to compute short distances between these disjoint representatives, based on an intuitive disk-with-handles represntation of a surface. Here is the link to the original publication on arXiv.

MICC is currently still in beta, but is available for download for Mac OS X and Ubuntu 12.04+. Windows is still currently in development. For the time being, Windows users can create an Ubuntu virtual machine and use MICC from within the virtual operating system. For both operating systems, navigate in Terminal to the directory of the downloaded file, type without quotes "chmod 777 MICC-xxx", with xxx replaced with the name of the version, and press enter. For Mac OS X users, simply double-click on the downloaded file to open the MICC command prompt. For Ubuntu users, navigate in Terminal to the directory of the download file, type "./MICC-linux" and press enter.

MICC is released under the MIT License. Our source code is available on both Github and PyPi. If MICC was helpful in your research, please consider citing it.