Crossing-critical graphs with large maximum degree

A conjecture of Richter and Salazar about graphs that are critical for a fixed crossing number $k$ is that they have bounded bandwidth. A weaker well-known conjecture of Richter is that their maximum degree is bounded in terms of $k$. In this note we disprove these conjectures for every $k\ge 171$, by providing examples of $k$-crossing-critical graphs with arbitrarily large maximum degree

Contact graphs of line segments are NP-complete

AbstractContact graphs are a special kind of intersection graphs of geometrical objects in which the objects are not allowed to cross but only to touch each other. Contact graphs of line segments in the plane are considered — it is proved that recognizing line-segment contact graphs, with contact degrees of 3 or more, is an NP-complete problem, even for planar graphs. This result contributes to the related research on recognition complexity of curve contact graphs (Hliněný J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 74 (1998) 87)

Low Ply Drawings of Trees

We consider the recently introduced model of \emph{low ply graph drawing}, in which the ply-disks of the vertices do not have many common overlaps, which results in a good distribution of the vertices in the plane. The \emph{ply-disk} of a vertex in a straight-line drawing is the disk centered at it whose radius is half the length of its longest incident edge. The largest number of ply-disks having a common overlap is called the \emph{ply-number} of the drawing. We focus on trees. We first consider drawings of trees with constant ply-number, proving that they may require exponential area, even for stars, and that they may not even exist for bounded-degree trees. Then, we turn our attention to drawings with logarithmic ply-number and show that trees with maximum degree $6$ always admit such drawings in polynomial area.Comment: This is a complete access version of a paper that will appear in the proceedings of GD201

Complexity of Anchored Crossing Number and Crossing Number of Almost Planar Graphs

In this paper we deal with the problem of computing the exact crossing number of almost planar graphs and the closely related problem of computing the exact anchored crossing number of a pair of planar graphs. It was shown by [Cabello and Mohar, 2013] that both problems are NP-hard; although they required an unbounded number of high-degree vertices (in the first problem) or an unbounded number of anchors (in the second problem) to prove their result. Somehow surprisingly, only three vertices of degree greater than 3, or only three anchors, are sufficient to maintain hardness of these problems, as we prove here. The new result also improves the previous result on hardness of joint crossing number on surfaces by [Hlin\v{e}n\'y and Salazar, 2015]. Our result is best possible in the anchored case since the anchored crossing number of a pair of planar graphs with two anchors each is trivial, and close to being best possible in the almost planar case since the crossing number is efficiently computable for almost planar graphs of maximum degree 3 [Riskin 1996, Cabello and Mohar 2011]