Thoughts on Barnette's Conjecture

We prove a new sufficient condition for a cubic 3-connected planar graph to be Hamiltonian. This condition is most easily described as a property of the dual graph. Let $G$ be a planar triangulation. Then the dual $G^*$ is a cubic 3-connected planar graph, and $G^*$ is bipartite if and only if $G$ is Eulerian. We prove that if the vertices of $G$ are (improperly) coloured blue and red, such that the blue vertices cover the faces of $G$, there is no blue cycle, and every red cycle contains a vertex of degree at most 4, then $G^*$ is Hamiltonian. This result implies the following special case of Barnette's Conjecture: if $G$ is an Eulerian planar triangulation, whose vertices are properly coloured blue, red and green, such that every red-green cycle contains a vertex of degree 4, then $G^*$ is Hamiltonian. Our final result highlights the limitations of using a proper colouring of $G$ as a starting point for proving Barnette's Conjecture. We also explain related results on Barnette's Conjecture that were obtained by Kelmans and for which detailed self-contained proofs have not been published.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

A note on Barnette's conjecture

Barnette conjectured that each planar, bipartite, cubic, and 3-connected graph is hamiltonian. We prove that this conjecture is equivalent to the statement that there is a constant c > 0 such that each graph G of this class contains a path on at least c |V(G) | vertices

Thoughts on Barnette's conjecture

We prove a new sufficient condition for a cubic 3-connected planar graph to be Hamiltonian. This condition is most easily described as a property of the dual graph. Let G be a planar triangulation. Then the dual G∗ is a cubic 3-connected planar graph, and G∗ is bipartite if and only if G is Eulerian. We prove that if the vertices of G are (improperly) coloured blue and red, such that the blue vertices cover the faces of G, there is no blue cycle, and every red cycle contains a vertex of degree at most 4, then G∗ is Hamiltonian. This result implies the following special case of Barnette’s Conjec- ture: if G is an Eulerian planar triangulation, whose vertices are properly coloured blue, red and green, such that every red-green cycle contains a vertex of degree 4, then G∗ is Hamiltonian. Our final result highlights the limitations of using a proper colouring of G as a starting point for proving Barnette’s Conjecture. We also explain related results on Bar- nette’s Conjecture that were obtained by Kelmans and for which detailed self-contained proofs have not been published

Kalai's squeezed 3-spheres are polytopal

In 1988, Kalai extended a construction of Billera and Lee to produce many triangulated (d-1)-spheres. In fact, in view of upper bounds on the number of simplicial d-polytopes by Goodman and Pollack, he derived that for every dimension d>=5, most of these (d-1)-spheres are not polytopal. However, for d=4, this reasoning fails. We can now show that, as already conjectured by Kalai, all of his 3-spheres are in fact polytopal. Moreover, we can now give a shorter proof of Hebble & Lee's 2000 result that the dual graphs of these 4-polytopes are Hamiltonian. Therefore, the polars of these Kalai polytopes yield another family supporting Barnette's conjecture that all simple 4-polytopes admit a Hamiltonian circuit.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in J. Discrete & Computational Geometr