Homology of planar polygon spaces

In this paper, we study topology of the variety of closed planar n-gons with given side lengths . The moduli space where , encodes the shapes of all such n-gons. We describe the Betti numbers of the moduli spaces as functions of the length vector . We also find sharp upper bounds on the sum of Betti numbers of depending only on the number of links n. Our method is based on an observation of a remarkable interaction between Morse functions and involutions under the condition that the fixed points of the involution coincide with the critical points of the Morse function.