Strongly Monotone Drawings of Planar Graphs

A straight-line drawing of a graph is a monotone drawing if for each pair of vertices there is a path which is monotonically increasing in some direction, and it is called a strongly monotone drawing if the direction of monotonicity is given by the direction of the line segment connecting the two vertices. We present algorithms to compute crossing-free strongly monotone drawings for some classes of planar graphs; namely, 3-connected planar graphs, outerplanar graphs, and 2-trees. The drawings of 3-connected planar graphs are based on primal-dual circle packings. Our drawings of outerplanar graphs are based on a new algorithm that constructs strongly monotone drawings of trees which are also convex. For irreducible trees, these drawings are strictly convex

On two conjectures about the proper connection number of graphs

A path in an edge-colored graph is called proper if no two consecutive edges of the path receive the same color. For a connected graph $G$, the proper connection number $pc(G)$ of $G$ is defined as the minimum number of colors needed to color its edges so that every pair of distinct vertices of $G$ are connected by at least one proper path in $G$. In this paper, we consider two conjectures on the proper connection number of graphs. The first conjecture states that if $G$ is a noncomplete graph with connectivity $\kappa(G) = 2$ and minimum degree $\delta(G)\ge 3$, then $pc(G) = 2$, posed by Borozan et al.~in [Discrete Math. 312(2012), 2550-2560]. We give a family of counterexamples to disprove this conjecture. However, from a result of Thomassen it follows that 3-edge-connected noncomplete graphs have proper connection number 2. Using this result, we can prove that if $G$ is a 2-connected noncomplete graph with $diam(G)=3$, then $pc(G) = 2$, which solves the second conjecture we want to mention, posed by Li and Magnant in [Theory \& Appl. Graphs 0(1)(2015), Art.2].Comment: 10 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1601.0416