Irreducible Triangulations are Small

A triangulation of a surface is \emph{irreducible} if there is no edge whose contraction produces another triangulation of the surface. We prove that every irreducible triangulation of a surface with Euler genus $g\geq1$ has at most $13g-4$ vertices. The best previous bound was $171g-72$.Comment: v2: Referees' comments incorporate

Line graphs and 22-geodesic transitivity

For a graph $\Gamma$, a positive integer $s$ and a subgroup G\leq \Aut(\Gamma), we prove that $G$ is transitive on the set of $s$-arcs of $\Gamma$ if and only if $\Gamma$ has girth at least $2(s-1)$ and $G$ is transitive on the set of $(s-1)$-geodesics of its line graph. As applications, we first prove that the only non-complete locally cyclic $2$-geodesic transitive graphs are the complete multipartite graph $K_{3[2]}$ and the icosahedron. Secondly we classify 2-geodesic transitive graphs of valency 4 and girth 3, and determine which of them are geodesic transitive

Difference of Facial Achromatic Numbers between Two Triangular Embeddings of a Graph

A facial $3$-complete $k$-coloring of a triangulation $G$ on a surface is a vertex $k$-coloring such that every triple of $k$-colors appears on the boundary of some face of $G$. The facial $3$-achromatic number $\psi_3(G)$ of $G$ is the maximum integer $k$ such that $G$ has a facial $3$-complete $k$-coloring. This notion is an expansion of the complete coloring, that is, a proper vertex coloring of a graph such that every pair of colors appears on the ends of some edge. For two triangulations $G$ and $G\u27$ on a surface, $\psi_3(G)$ may not be equal to $\psi_3(G\u27)$ even if $G$ is isomorphic to $G\u27$ as graphs. Hence, it would be interesting to see how large the difference between $\psi_3(G)$ and $\psi_3(G\u27)$ can be. We shall show that an upper bound for such difference in terms of the genus of the surface

Blocking nonorientability of a surface

AbstractLet S be a nonorientable surface. A collection of pairwise noncrossing simple closed curves in S is a blockage if every one-sided simple closed curve in S crosses at least one of them. Robertson and Thomas [9] conjectured that the orientable genus of any graph G embedded in S with sufficiently large face-width is “roughly” equal to one-half of the minimum number of intersections of a blockage with the graph. The conjecture was disproved by Mohar (Discrete Math. 182 (1998) 245) and replaced by a similar one. In this paper, it is proved that the conjectures in Mohar (1998) and Robertson and Thomas (J. Graph Theory 15 (1991) 407) hold up to a constant error term: For any graph G embedded in S, the orientable genus of G differs from the conjectured value at most by O(g2), where g is the genus of S

On the genera of polyhedral embeddings of cubic graph

In this article we present theoretical and computational results on the existence of polyhedral embeddings of graphs. The emphasis is on cubic graphs. We also describe an efficient algorithm to compute all polyhedral embeddings of a given cubic graph and constructions for cubic graphs with some special properties of their polyhedral embeddings. Some key results are that even cubic graphs with a polyhedral embedding on the torus can also have polyhedral embeddings in arbitrarily high genus, in fact in a genus {\em close} to the theoretical maximum for that number of vertices, and that there is no bound on the number of genera in which a cubic graph can have a polyhedral embedding. While these results suggest a large variety of polyhedral embeddings, computations for up to 28 vertices suggest that by far most of the cubic graphs do not have a polyhedral embedding in any genus and that the ratio of these graphs is increasing with the number of vertices.Comment: The C-program implementing the algorithm described in this article can be obtained from any of the author

Constant-factor approximations for asymmetric TSP on nearly-embeddable graphs

In the Asymmetric Traveling Salesperson Problem (ATSP) the goal is to find a closed walk of minimum cost in a directed graph visiting every vertex. We consider the approximability of ATSP on topologically restricted graphs. It has been shown by [Oveis Gharan and Saberi 2011] that there exists polynomial-time constant-factor approximations on planar graphs and more generally graphs of constant orientable genus. This result was extended to non-orientable genus by [Erickson and Sidiropoulos 2014]. We show that for any class of \emph{nearly-embeddable} graphs, ATSP admits a polynomial-time constant-factor approximation. More precisely, we show that for any fixed $k\geq 0$, there exist $\alpha, \beta>0$, such that ATSP on $n$-vertex $k$-nearly-embeddable graphs admits a $\alpha$-approximation in time $O(n^\beta)$. The class of $k$-nearly-embeddable graphs contains graphs with at most $k$ apices, $k$ vortices of width at most $k$, and an underlying surface of either orientable or non-orientable genus at most $k$. Prior to our work, even the case of graphs with a single apex was open. Our algorithm combines tools from rounding the Held-Karp LP via thin trees with dynamic programming. We complement our upper bounds by showing that solving ATSP exactly on graphs of pathwidth $k$ (and hence on $k$-nearly embeddable graphs) requires time $n^{\Omega(k)}$, assuming the Exponential-Time Hypothesis (ETH). This is surprising in light of the fact that both TSP on undirected graphs and Minimum Cost Hamiltonian Cycle on directed graphs are FPT parameterized by treewidth