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We determine which connected surfaces can be partitioned into topological circles. There are exactly seven such surfaces up to homeomorphism: those of finite type, of Euler characteristic zero, and with compact boundary components. As a byproduct, we get that any circle decomposition of a surface is upper semicontinuous., Comment: 9 pages, final version, to appear in Topology and its Applications (2010). A few missprints have been corrected

Two vectors in $\BZ^3$ are called \emph{twins} if they are orthogonal and have the same length. The paper describes twin pairs using cubic lattices, and counts the number of twin pairs with a given length. Integers $M$ with the property that each integral vector with length $\sqrt{M}$ has a twin are called twin-complete. They are completely characterized modulo a famous conjecture in number theory. The main tool is the decomposition theory of Hurwitz integral quaternions. Throughout the paper we made a concerted effort to keep the exposition as elementary as possible., Comment: 23 pages, final version to appear in Journal of Number Theory