Transversal structures on triangulations: a combinatorial study and straight-line drawings

This article focuses on a combinatorial structure specific to triangulated plane graphs with quadrangular outer face and no separating triangle, which are called irreducible triangulations. The structure has been introduced by Xin He under the name of regular edge-labelling and consists of two bipolar orientations that are transversal. For this reason, the terminology used here is that of transversal structures. The main results obtained in the article are a bijection between irreducible triangulations and ternary trees, and a straight-line drawing algorithm for irreducible triangulations. For a random irreducible triangulation with $n$ vertices, the grid size of the drawing is asymptotically with high probability $11n/27\times 11n/27$ up to an additive error of \cO(\sqrt{n}). In contrast, the best previously known algorithm for these triangulations only guarantees a grid size $(\lceil n/2\rceil -1)\times \lfloor n/2\rfloor$.Comment: 42 pages, the second version is shorter, focusing on the bijection (with application to counting) and on the graph drawing algorithm. The title has been slightly change

Inside-Out Polytopes

We present a common generalization of counting lattice points in rational polytopes and the enumeration of proper graph colorings, nowhere-zero flows on graphs, magic squares and graphs, antimagic squares and graphs, compositions of an integer whose parts are partially distinct, and generalized latin squares. Our method is to generalize Ehrhart's theory of lattice-point counting to a convex polytope dissected by a hyperplane arrangement. We particularly develop the applications to graph and signed-graph coloring, compositions of an integer, and antimagic labellings.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures; to appear in Adv. Mat

The Number of Nowhere-Zero Flows on Graphs and Signed Graphs

A nowhere-zero $k$-flow on a graph $\Gamma$ is a mapping from the edges of $\Gamma$ to the set \{\pm1, \pm2, ..., \pm(k-1)\} \subset \bbZ such that, in any fixed orientation of $\Gamma$, at each node the sum of the labels over the edges pointing towards the node equals the sum over the edges pointing away from the node. We show that the existence of an \emph{integral flow polynomial} that counts nowhere-zero $k$-flows on a graph, due to Kochol, is a consequence of a general theory of inside-out polytopes. The same holds for flows on signed graphs. We develop these theories, as well as the related counting theory of nowhere-zero flows on a signed graph with values in an abelian group of odd order. Our results are of two kinds: polynomiality or quasipolynomiality of the flow counting functions, and reciprocity laws that interpret the evaluations of the flow polynomials at negative integers in terms of the combinatorics of the graph.Comment: 17 pages, to appear in J. Combinatorial Th. Ser.

On the expected number of perfect matchings in cubic planar graphs

A well-known conjecture by Lov\'asz and Plummer from the 1970s asserted that a bridgeless cubic graph has exponentially many perfect matchings. It was solved in the affirmative by Esperet et al. (Adv. Math. 2011). On the other hand, Chudnovsky and Seymour (Combinatorica 2012) proved the conjecture in the special case of cubic planar graphs. In our work we consider random bridgeless cubic planar graphs with the uniform distribution on graphs with $n$ vertices. Under this model we show that the expected number of perfect matchings in labeled bridgeless cubic planar graphs is asymptotically $c\gamma^n$, where $c>0$ and $\gamma \sim 1.14196$ is an explicit algebraic number. We also compute the expected number of perfect matchings in (non necessarily bridgeless) cubic planar graphs and provide lower bounds for unlabeled graphs. Our starting point is a correspondence between counting perfect matchings in rooted cubic planar maps and the partition function of the Ising model in rooted triangulations.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Rainbow kk-connectivity of random bipartite graphs

A path in an edge-colored graph $G$ is called a rainbow path if no two edges of the path are colored the same. The minimum number of colors required to color the edges of $G$ such that every pair of vertices are connected by at least $k$ internally vertex-disjoint rainbow paths is called the rainbow $k$-connectivity of the graph $G$, denoted by $rc_k(G)$. For the random graph $G(n,p)$, He and Liang got a sharp threshold function for the property $rc_k(G(n,p))\leq d$. In this paper, we extend this result to the case of random bipartite graph $G(m,n,p)$.Comment: 15 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1012.1942 by other author