Stronger ILPs for the Graph Genus Problem

The minimum genus of a graph is an important question in graph theory and a key ingredient in several graph algorithms. However, its computation is NP-hard and turns out to be hard even in practice. Only recently, the first non-trivial approach - based on SAT and ILP (integer linear programming) models - has been presented, but it is unable to successfully tackle graphs of genus larger than 1 in practice. Herein, we show how to improve the ILP formulation. The crucial ingredients are two-fold. First, we show that instead of modeling rotation schemes explicitly, it suffices to optimize over partitions of the (bidirected) arc set A of the graph. Second, we exploit the cycle structure of the graph, explicitly mapping short closed walks on A to faces in the embedding. Besides the theoretical advantages of our models, we show their practical strength by a thorough experimental evaluation. Contrary to the previous approach, we are able to quickly solve many instances of genus > 1

Some Triangulated Surfaces without Balanced Splitting

Let G be the graph of a triangulated surface $\Sigma$ of genus $g\geq 2$. A cycle of G is splitting if it cuts $\Sigma$ into two components, neither of which is homeomorphic to a disk. A splitting cycle has type k if the corresponding components have genera k and g-k. It was conjectured that G contains a splitting cycle (Barnette '1982). We confirm this conjecture for an infinite family of triangulations by complete graphs but give counter-examples to a stronger conjecture (Mohar and Thomassen '2001) claiming that G should contain splitting cycles of every possible type.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure

The complement of proper power graphs of finite groups

For a finite group $G$, the proper power graph $\mathscr{P}^*(G)$ of $G$ is the graph whose vertices are non-trivial elements of $G$ and two vertices $u$ and $v$ are adjacent if and only if $u \neq v$ and $u^m=v$ or $v^m=u$ for some positive integer $m$. In this paper, we consider the complement of $\mathscr{P}^*(G)$, denoted by ${\overline{\mathscr{P}^*(G)}}$. We classify all finite groups whose complement of proper power graphs is complete, bipartite, a path, a cycle, a star, claw-free, triangle-free, disconnected, planar, outer-planar, toroidal, or projective. Among the other results, we also determine the diameter and girth of the complement of proper power graphs of finite groups.Comment: 29 pages, 14 figures, Lemma 4.1 has been added and consequent changes have been mad