  When persistence diagrams are formalized as the Mobius inversion of the
birth-death function, they naturally generalize to the multi-parameter setting
and enjoy many of the key properties, such as stability, that we expect in
applications. The direct definition in the 2-parameter setting, and the
corresponding brute-force algorithm to compute them, require $\Omega(n^4)$
operations. But the size of the generalized persistence diagram, $C$, can be as
low as linear (and as high as cubic). We elucidate a connection between the
2-parameter and the ordinary 1-parameter settings, which allows us to design an
output-sensitive algorithm, whose running time is in $O(n^3 + Cn)$.
