626 research outputs found
The -genus of Kuratowski minors
A drawing of a graph on a surface is independently even if every pair of
nonadjacent edges in the drawing crosses an even number of times. The
-genus of a graph is the minimum such that has an
independently even drawing on the orientable surface of genus . An
unpublished result by Robertson and Seymour implies that for every , every
graph of sufficiently large genus contains as a minor a projective
grid or one of the following so-called -Kuratowski graphs: , or
copies of or sharing at most common vertices. We show that
the -genus of graphs in these families is unbounded in ; in
fact, equal to their genus. Together, this implies that the genus of a graph is
bounded from above by a function of its -genus, solving a problem
posed by Schaefer and \v{S}tefankovi\v{c}, and giving an approximate version of
the Hanani-Tutte theorem on orientable surfaces. We also obtain an analogous
result for Euler genus and Euler -genus of graphs.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures; a few references added and correcte
Irreducible triangulations of surfaces with boundary
A triangulation of a surface is irreducible if no edge can be contracted to
produce a triangulation of the same surface. In this paper, we investigate
irreducible triangulations of surfaces with boundary. We prove that the number
of vertices of an irreducible triangulation of a (possibly non-orientable)
surface of genus g>=0 with b>=0 boundaries is O(g+b). So far, the result was
known only for surfaces without boundary (b=0). While our technique yields a
worse constant in the O(.) notation, the present proof is elementary, and
simpler than the previous ones in the case of surfaces without boundary
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