Five proofs that the Euler characteristic of a closed orientable surface is even

Let be a closed orientable surface of genus . (Below we will occasionally write , omitting the genus.) Then its Euler characteristic is even. In this post we will give five proofs of this fact that do not use the fact that we can directly compute the Euler characteristic to be , roughly in increasing order of sophistication. Along the way we’ll end up encountering or proving more general results that have other interesting applications.

Read Full Post »