Flows with minimal number of singularities in the Boy's surface

Abstract

We study flows on the Boy's surface. The Boy's surface is the image of the projective plane under a certain immersion into the three-dimensional Euclidean space. It has a natural stratification consisting of one 0-dimensional stratum (central point), three 1-dimensional strata (loops starting at this point), and four 2-dimensional strata (three of them are disks lying on the same plane as the 1-dimensional strata, and having the loops as boundaries). We found all 342 optimal Morse-Smale flows and all 80 optimal projective Morse-Smale flows on the Boy's surface.