On the combinatorial and topological complexity of a single cell

The problem of bounding the combinatorial complexity of a single connected component (a single cell) of the complement of a set of a geometric objects in R/sup k/, each object of constant description complexity, is an important problem in computational geometry which has attracted much attention over the past decade. It has been conjectured that the combinatorial complexity of a single cell is bounded by a function much closer to O(n/sup k-1/) rather than O(n/sup k/) which is the bound for the combinatorial complexity of the whole arrangement. Till now, this was known to be rule only for k/spl les/3 and only for some special cases in higher dimensions. A classic result in real algebraic geometry due to Oleinik-Petrovsky, Thom and Milnor, bounds the topological complexity (the sum of the Betti numbers) of basic semi-algebraic sets. However, till now no better bounds were known if we restricted attention to a single connected component of a basic semi-algebraic set. In this paper, we show how these two problems are related. We prove a new bound on the sum of the Betti numbers of one connected component of a basic semi-algebraic set which is an improvement over the Oleinik-Petrovsky-Thom-Milnor bound. This also implies that the topological complexity of a single cell, measured by the sum of the Betti numbers, is bounded by O(n/sup k-1/).