On the complexity of non-orientable Seifert fibre spaces

Abstract

In this paper we deal with Seifert fibre spaces, which are compact 3-manifolds admitting a foliation by circles. We give a combinatorial description for these manifolds in all the possible cases: orientable, non-orientable, closed, with boundary. Moreover, we compute a potentially sharp upper bound for their complexity in terms of the invariants of the combinatorial description, extending to the non-orientable case results by Fominykh and Wiest for the orientable case with boundary and by Martelli and Petronio for the closed orientable case.

Revised version with some changes in the introduction. Accepted for publication on Indiana Univ. Math. J