Fat triangles determine linearly many holes (computational geometry)

It is shown that for every fixed delta >0 the following holds: if F is a union of n triangles, all of whose angles are at least delta , then the complement of F has O(n) connected components, and the boundary of F consists of O(n log log n) segments. This latter complexity becomes linear if all triangles are of roughly the same size or if they are all infinite wedges. A randomized algorithm that computes F in expected time O(n2/sup alpha (n)/ log n) is given. Several applications of these results are presented.