String graphs. I. The number of critical nonstring graphs is infinite

AbstractString graphs (intersection graphs of curves in the plane) were originally studied in connection with RC-circuits. The family of string graphs is closed in the induced minor order, and so it is reasonable to study critical nonstring graphs (nonstring graphs such that all of their proper induced minors are string graphs). The question of whether there are infinitely many nonisomorphic critical nonstring graphs has been an open problem for some time. The main result of this paper settles this question. In a later paper of this series we show that recognizing string graphs is NP-hard

A Van Kampen type obstruction for string graphs

In this paper we prove that a graph is a string graph (the intersection graph of curves in the plane) if and only if it admits a drawing in the plane with certain properties. This also allows us to define an algebraic obstruction, similar to the Van Kampen obstruction to embeddability, which must vanish for every string graph. However, unlike in the case of graph planarity this obstruction is incomplete.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

On String Graph Limits and the Structure of a Typical String Graph

We study limits of convergent sequences of string graphs, that is, graphs with an intersection representation consisting of curves in the plane. We use these results to study the limiting behavior of a sequence of random string graphs. We also prove similar results for several related graph classes.Comment: 18 page

Intersection Graphs of Rays and Grounded Segments

We consider several classes of intersection graphs of line segments in the plane and prove new equality and separation results between those classes. In particular, we show that: (1) intersection graphs of grounded segments and intersection graphs of downward rays form the same graph class, (2) not every intersection graph of rays is an intersection graph of downward rays, and (3) not every intersection graph of rays is an outer segment graph. The first result answers an open problem posed by Cabello and Jej\v{c}i\v{c}. The third result confirms a conjecture by Cabello. We thereby completely elucidate the remaining open questions on the containment relations between these classes of segment graphs. We further characterize the complexity of the recognition problems for the classes of outer segment, grounded segment, and ray intersection graphs. We prove that these recognition problems are complete for the existential theory of the reals. This holds even if a 1-string realization is given as additional input.Comment: 16 pages 12 Figure

Hierarchical Partial Planarity

In this paper we consider graphs whose edges are associated with a degree of {\em importance}, which may depend on the type of connections they represent or on how recently they appeared in the scene, in a streaming setting. The goal is to construct layouts of these graphs in which the readability of an edge is proportional to its importance, that is, more important edges have fewer crossings. We formalize this problem and study the case in which there exist three different degrees of importance. We give a polynomial-time testing algorithm when the graph induced by the two most important sets of edges is biconnected. We also discuss interesting relationships with other constrained-planarity problems.Comment: Conference version appeared in WG201

Outerstring graphs are χ\chi-bounded

An outerstring graph is an intersection graph of curves that lie in a common half-plane and have one endpoint on the boundary of that half-plane. We prove that the class of outerstring graphs is $\chi$-bounded, which means that their chromatic number is bounded by a function of their clique number. This generalizes a series of previous results on $\chi$-boundedness of outerstring graphs with various additional restrictions on the shape of curves or the number of times the pairs of curves can cross. The assumption that each curve has an endpoint on the boundary of the half-plane is justified by the known fact that triangle-free intersection graphs of straight-line segments can have arbitrarily large chromatic number.Comment: Introduction extended by a survey of results on (outer)string graphs, some minor correction